I really feel there would be a market for something like star citizen without all the realism stuff that gets in the way of the gameplay. I’m a backer, and when I can get to playing the game it’s fun, but finding my way to the launch pad after every two years break when I’m trying to checkup on progress sucks.
Years ago I made a space game that was basically, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, but with spaceships. I made it way too complicated and basically only I could play it, but I’ve often thought that it was a good basis for a game if only I made it less stupid.
I cannot believe nobody has made a space game since, where being the master of your ship is the whole goal. Basically Euro truck simulator in space. One of the nice things about that game is that all the gamey stuff is just handled by menus so that you can actually get to the experience without having to wander around a supplemental environment that doesn’t really add anything to the experience.
It is, it’s also in alpha still. If they were claiming beta in this state I’d be more worried rather than just mad they keep adding stupid shit instead of going full optimization. They have a game, they just need to get it out the door and worry about content in future releases. It’s like the painter who can’t call a painting finished.
There is “this game needs some more baking in the oven” and then there is “let’s stick it in the oven and forget about it, hopefully it’ll get incinerated and we can take everyone’s money”.
Oh well if they’ve only started four times then that’s fine. It’s only a problem if they do it 20 times right, then we worry, but 4 times, nah, that’s standard.
You are correct words do have a meaning. A weird thing for you to bring up since you’re the one incorrectly applying labels here.
Alpha products are available only for internal review, they are not available for public release they are not intended to be viewed by the general populace.
If you’re charging people money for it then it can’t be an alpha because now it’s an external product not an internal sample.
In video games development, and more broadly in software development, Alpha state refers to a feature incomplete and largely untested state and is unrelated to internal/external sales, review, testing or release.
Alpha software is not thoroughly tested by the developer before it is released to customers.
While outside of recent trends, particularly in crowd funded games development, alpha releases to customers for paid software are less common they do occur and don’t have any bearing on the alpha state of the software.
In general, external availability of alpha software is uncommon for proprietary software, while open source software often has publicly available alpha versions.
Further
A feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has all of its planned or primary features implemented but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues. This occurs at the end of alpha testing in development.
And for Beta
Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. A beta phase generally begins when the software is feature-complete but likely to contain several known or unknown bugs
I am both a qualified software developer, and have worked in the video games industry. I hope you have learnt something.
Okay whatever you need to say to justify it to yourself.
This game came out before I went into university I’ve now graduated and could have completed a doctorate and it still wouldn’t have been in beta yet. Is the development studio near black hole or something what’s going on here.
I’ll be “that guy” but according to Chris Roberts (the guy who owns CIG that is making the game) star citizen is supposed to be a “space life” game. It’s not an “arcade game” where there is a specific game type it is built around. You’re supposed to just be a dude/dudette living your life out in space and do what you want which can include all the things you mentioned. I personally want that very much. There are a million games out there that do the basic space pew pew thing or mining, but nothing like a life sim.
There’s going to be more than just hunger and dehydration, they built toilets and showers into some ships for a specific reason not just atheistics lol
Yeah, the problem is it wasn’t sold as a space life game a decade ago. And there’s a vast gulf between space life sim and actually having to eat/pee. It was already controversial when he said capital ships wouldn’t despawn so you’ll have to hide it and keep a 24/7 watch to make sure it isn’t stolen. A game isn’t supposed to be a job, there’s got to be a happy medium there.
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.)
Wow, I guess I assumed that I misunderstood something before launch because it was hard to believe they would make a multiplayer game that needed 3 people but wouldnt work with two but here we are. What a move.
you can queue with a single friend, you’ll just get another random player. which is not ideal, but probably not back breaking either, unless there is some stupid way to grief other players.
some of the steam reviews made me think that i literally can’t queue with a friend unless we are three people.
After playing last night, it’s not back breaking to queue up but it’s full body cast inducing getting a “bad” third player because there’s no forfeit method and you can’t even intentionally spike the run until the first boss.
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.
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