On the one hand, Annapurna seems to know what they’re doing - Nimona was fantastic. On the other hand, I think it’s going to be hard to make this into a movie. I’m assuming they’ll focus on the journey of the cat and the environment around it, but they’ll have to fill all of the other space, hopefully with the robots and their personalities.
I hope the cat in the movie will look more natural than the one in the game.
In the game, the animation looks great. I’m sure they took a lot of effort with the motion capture.
But there is something weird about the cat’s face. It just doesn’t look like a cat, no realistically, not cartoonish either. Perhaps some adjustment in the facial modelling will help.
[Baldur’s Gate 3] will also be out on Xbox before the end of 2023. (…) “It’s 2023. And 2023 is narrowing, so it’s already pretty precise in my book. Between September and November… So, as fast as we can honestly,” Vincke said.
Is this a single player game? Then cool, 100%, love it. Co-op? Probably fine, but I’d have some implementation questions.
Pvp? I ate the biggest backlash I’ve had on the Internet on another forum when I argued that players shouldn’t be able to unilaterally make the game easier for just themselves in a competitive game, and I’m still mad about it.
That’s probably fine. Like if you want to play with triple iframes you can play with other people that have triple iframes (or who said they’re ok with that). I just don’t think you should be able to adjust your iframes whenever you want. Like, not in the middle of a match you’re losing.
I don’t know how to solve match making if you have a lot of those settings. Like if you can change iframes, parry frames, max health, max stamina, max incoming damage, min outgoing damage, and so on, that’s an explosive set of variables. You’d be lucky to find someone with your exact settings. Which is maybe fine? Maybe most people would use the defaults.
But the last time I had this conversation, some guy was adamant he should be able to play with me even if he has his settings tweaked to be nigh indestructible.
When did games go from being something fun to do, to people getting so serious about them that they would rather fuck over a bunch of disabled people than lose a game?
Whenever I play competitive games I see people raging in the comments like every game, and it's usually people who aren't doing very good that round because they want to blame everyone else for losing. Idk why y'all are paying $60+ just to be angry the entire time. Fuck around and have fun, it's not that serious.
It's so bad you're STILL mad about a hypothetical situation that doesn't even exist. Spiderman 2 is single player. If it was competitive, and disabled people being able to play ruins your life sooo much, then don't play it. Crisis averted.
Yes, I do get upset when people act like disabled people needing accommodations is ruining their life. For obvious reasons. Disabled people had no accommodations in games for literal decades and suddenly able bodied people act like it's the end of the world when they start getting introduced. The difference is that some disabled people literally cannot play when you have a choice. And ranting, on multiple forums, about how accommodations will ruin your hypothetical competitive game that doesn't even exist yet!
And games are not the only scenario, I see a similar attitude in every instance where disabled people are granted accomodations.
You want accomodations to not exist in certain scenarios. Your comment was clear.
You’re not engaging with what I’m actually saying. I’m not saying accomodations are ruining my life.
It feels to me like what you’re saying is that “Accommodations” has an unbound scope. Anything and everything can be changed in the name of accommodations. Double your health in street fighter? Fine. See the other players hands in Poker. Sure. Turn on slow-mo in Quake9? Well okay.
And any of those things might be fine and fun if everyone playing agrees. Maybe you’re new at poker and I want to show one of my cards as a boost to you, the rookie. But for you to walk into a game and be like “yo I need to see your cards to play” seems egregious.
Maybe that’s not what you meant.
Maybe for you this is a “for me it was Tuesday.” You’ve possibly spent your whole life arguing with assholes like me who can just take their presumably abled asses and just walk away when it’s no longer interesting to them. I’m sorry for your struggles and injustices. You don’t really owe me anything.
I'm not sure what you're on about but he wasn't complaining about Spider-Man 2. He even said if a game is 1P, then he's fine with any settings a player wants.
His complaint was about competitive games and I think it's a fair complaint (albeit a bit off topic) I don't think it's in your (or anyone else's) purview to tell others what games are or aren't about nor how seriously they should take their games.
We have entire competitive (and, imo, friendly) communities centered around competition and the notion that the rules are the same for everyone.
You could give bullet time to one player while the other moves and controls slowly. Or you could give one player bigger iframes to sort of approximate it.
Like, for one player they’re invulnerable for a full two seconds after pushing dodge, but the other player is only invulnerable for a quarter second.
Lots of ways to try
But as someone else in this thread said, this was kind of me going off topic. Slightly related but not exactly what the article was about.
Don’t make me point to the sign with people standing on boxes in front of a fence.
This should be very easily solved with matchmaking lobby settings.
Anyway, most accessibility settings are either something every competitive player should be using anyway (reasonable color contrast settings, HUD tweaks for clarity) or things that only people who need them despately would ever use (remapping all buttons to be able to play using only a stick in the players mouth, because they have no hands).
This seems to me like a total non-issue. And in the very few cases it is, the ranked lobbies can just diable that setting.
The backlash was probably because for you and I a harmed pvp experience is a “could happen” while for a bunch of gamers the lack of accessibility is a daily undeniable part of their reality. For some people, games are a critical sanity-saving retreat from the rest of their life. Let’s let them have their tweaks outside of ranked play.
I don’t have problems with control changes, subtitles, HUD stuff, all the things that are typically considered accessibility. I reject the idea that any arbitrary piece of a multiplayer game can be unilaterally changed in the name of accessibility. Which is maybe not a take any reasonable person has., but it’s one I’ve encountered.
But your last paragraph is probably right in that for them it was an emotionally charged “every day I deal with this bullshit” and I was coming off as “yeah but like what if i’m mildly inconvenienced one day?”.
Yeah, in the 15 minutes it takes to see if changing the setting caused any performance issues, I can easily just boot up Maze Mice and get through roughly 2 rounds with zero complications whatsoever. No need to change any settings from default or wait absurd lengths of time just to play a game without stuttering and other performance issues.
Also, your game is piss poorly optimized if you can’t get shader compiling working properly without tanking your experience in game.
I’ve played a handful of games that precompile shaders at boot up without it taking 15 minutes, and they try to hide at least some of it behind the splash screens and such. This is absurd. If pre-compilation or caching is needed, just fucking do it.
On top of what you said, that any company with the funds of Gearbox has no excuse for not being able to optimize it to happen during runtime without tanking FPS.
When you launch a game, and… your drivers have changed, or there’s been a substantial update to the game… it just tells you its compiling shaders before properly launching the game.
15 full minutes is pretty terrible though.
I think my worst ever is around 5 to 10, and that is when I am intentionally fucking about with mods and different versions of Proton and changing up Proton/Wine prefixes with new attempts at finding a working Windows component/requirement for some nonsense that by all rights should not work at all, lol.
I don’t understand exactly why but they’re not storing the computed shaders so you constantly have to redo it. But it also shouldn’t be taking that long anyway. It takes the new battlefield maybe 30 seconds to do this, so something weird is going on in the background.
Here, pick from various amounts of these 3 options, these have been the explanations for basically every ass-tier AAA game in the past couple of years:
UE5 is very flashy, ‘developer friendly’ garbage that explodes in complexity when you try to do any serious modification/customization of the engine or render pipeline
None of these AAA devs that are supposed to be experts in UE5 actually are
Management is beyond incompetent and tells devs to do things that are actively bad/harmful/destructive/broken.
A lot of comments tying runbacks to difficulty, when they have nothing to do with each other. I haven’t playing silksong but I played about half of the original and uninstalled it, despite the fact it is so many people’s favorite metroidvania and metroidvania is one of my favorite genres.
Not putting checkpoints close to boss fights is not difficulty. It is disrespectful of the player’s time, which is a problem hollow Knight was full of.
I liked Hollow Knight, but yes, it kind of was. Frequent destinations were far away from fast travel, and there was a low level area that they transformed into a high level area later in the game specifically so that crossing the map wouldn’t be a cake walk. I’d argue that earning the power to make an area like that into a cake walk is a core part of the fun.
Not putting checkpoints close to boss fights is not difficulty.
You're pointing a finger at the Soulslike genre here, not only HK. Some games may abandon it, but this is common enough to be called a genre stable.
Just like the "hit hit, dodge/parry, hit hit" combat pattern, losing/recovering currency, enemies respawning on bonfire use… etc.
I think this whole genre is wack, TBH. I don't even find it difficult, I just think what they test is perseverance in the face of misery and tediousness, which's a bizarre thing to test in a video game. It's almost as if it's straight up telling you: this is a serious video game, no room for fun here.
Meanwhile, Ninja Gaiden proved you can simultaneously have extreme difficulty AND fun like one million years ago.
It’s true that I’d prefer it in no games, but it’s also less frustrating in straight soulslikes. The problem with HK is that it is a synthesis of metroidvania and soulslikes in the most time-disrespecting ways possible. Really most of my frustrations are with map design, and then they add not getting maps until you find the map guy (in samey environments I can’t remember well enough without a map).
What made me put it down was playing for an hour going through multiple zones without finding either a map guy or a bench somehow then dying. I’m pretty sure just being able to see the map would have been enough to keep me playing.
For this new fangled soulsvania genre there are numerous better entries that I thoroughly enjoyed. Ender Lilies and Blasphemus are the first 2 that come to mind.
Personally I think we’d all be better off not even calling them Soulslikes, for this very reason. Full-blown Soulslikes have so many more nuances and systems that add to the experience.
Yeah, huh, apparently HK is tagged on Steam as a Souls-like, but I disagree… just brutal difficulty in a melee-heavy game isn’t enough to merit that badge, but oh, well.
Agreed. I’m not sure why I would waste my time with shit like this when it’s just objectively not fun for me to play.
Different strokes for different folks, so if you like it more power to you, but I’d rather play games that are fun to play for me.
I only have a certain amount of time to play video games, and if I can’t make any progress at all in an hour or two, why would I bother continuing when an hour or two is usually all I have in a day to play your game?
I’ve decided not to bother picking up silksong because I found HK tedious, frustrating, and unrewarding.
People who enjoy such games are clearly masochist who don’t know what a good game is if it hit them in the face. Idk why these sorts of “gamers” even exist. I long for the halcyon era where good stuff like Mario, Zelda and Sonic were the staples of hardcore gamers.
You're pointing a finger at the Soulslike genre here, not only HK. Some games may abandon it, but this is common enough to be called a genre stable.
You should try Salt and Sanctuary, Sekiro, Bloodborne, The Surge, Lords of the Fallen, or Lies of P—all had boss runbacks, and that's ignoring HK, Silksong, and the original Souls games.
Apparently I shouldn’t. But if there’s a list of soulslike games that do it, and a list of soulslike games that don’t, then it is not in fact true for the genre and is instead true for specific games.
You can make the case that it’s not a fun use of our time but how is it not tied to difficulty? Being able to get to the boss with enough health or consummables is certainly part of the intended challenge.
I haven’t played silksong, but most games like Dark Souls and the like, getting back to the boss without taking damage is pretty easy. It’s not difficulty, it’s just time.
I never actually liked FromSoft’s themselves, but several Soulslikes I really enjoyed did away with runbacks, or always had checkpoints right before bosses.
I really just want people to start evaluating each design decision Dark Souls made on its own - stop worshipping the whole as being perfect, because it most definitely is not. So many of the knowledge checks (poise, anyone?) are just there for experienced players to lord over confused shrubs.
I’m not really used to metroidvanias having runbacks honestly. Most I’ve played either have save points close to the bosses or just drop you outside the boss room if you die.
Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.
The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore? What do I keep dying to? Am I overlooking an obvious weakness during a particular boss mechanic, or am I not using an ability as effectively as I could be to stay alive?
If you let the player immediately run back into a boss, they will veg out and do just that until they eventually get lucky and barely down a boss by the skin of their teeth. But that’s not how you should be approaching these fights.
Sometimes the most productive run back even involves a good night’s rest.
The other day, I fought the boss of the abyss in the dark souls 1 dlc. It took me 5ish attempts, and I changed my gear to have more magic resist after I got further in the fight and got merked by magic attacks. All spending 2 minutes between each attempt running back to the fog gate did was make me zone out and wish I could just get right back to it.
Btw, the original runback was mega man, where you get to try the boss until you run out of lives then you have to do the entire level again. Still way more interesting than running past everything in souls games.
Do you believe DS and Megaman could have been even more iconic if they had listened to players and made their runs back shorter?
My point is, it’s not like the designers didn’t know what they were doing, this is a very obvious aspect of their gameplay. And regardless of how minor inconveniences like this make us feel as players, we don’t know that it’s not precisely those lows that contrast with the highs to create the intended experiences which made those games cult hits to begin with. You wouldn’t look at a Rembrandt and say, “look how much of the painting is just black! You’re wasting all this space! You could add so much detail and context in there!”
I’m a firm believer that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. If players weren’t complaining about the run back, then they would be complaining about the empty flask drinking animation. Inconvenience is not a convincing argument to me. Just like any art, games are free to evoke any and all emotions. It only becomes a problem if the emotion they keep evoking is boredom lol. But even then, boredom is a valid tool on the artist’s palette; sometimes the only ones who are getting bored are the boring people.
I loved Ender’s Lilies and it had save points outside the boss rooms. I do not believe the game would have been more iconic if I had to run through several rooms of enemies before fighting a boss again.
The joy of victory came from overcoming a difficult fight, not from avoiding a tedious repeat.
Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.
The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore?
Would be a lot more effective if I didn’t have to go pick up my shade. Which often can’t be accessed without locking yourself into the fight again.
I disagree, runbacks are as much difficulty as having to recover your currency after death, or even having to recover your items after dying in Minecraft. It’s a punishment for dying, and a way to make you treat it seriously.
It can incentivise the wrong things, punish experimentation and make players stick with what they know, even if better options exist. You’re free to dislike it, and it has downsides, but dismissing it as “not difficulty” is just dishonest.
Yeah same story for me every nintendo console. I’m like ahhh maybe I’ll skip this one. Then I blink and they’ve put out like a dozen masterpieces and I’m like ahhh they got me again
Seconded. Switch 2 at this point is mainly just worth it if you have a backlog of Switch 1 games that you want to play in better quality.
Donkey Kong is the first true “must buy” (MKW is good too but it’s mainly just for people who have played MK8 to death and want something new). It’s gonna be a bit for another tentpole franchise to carry the console further towards being a compelling purchase.
I’m not sure Air Riders will be that game either. I love the original Air Ride to death and I’m really looking forward to Air Riders, but I don’t think it carries a console. Metroid Prime 4 is probably the next big decider for a lot of people.
ign.com
Ważne