Yeah, and it’s sad bro. I put about 900 hours into Elite: Dangerous, which I enjoyed a great deal, but it still left me longing for something with more depth. Back then I thought Star Citizen would be the next leap forward in my career as a space trucker who dabbles in bounty hunting and deep space exploration. I wanted to have games worthy of justifying a home cockpit setup, and now it seems like a lost cause.
I really hope someone picks up the torch. Even if it’s just Frontier making a generational leap with the Elite IP.
Elite:Dangerous is sad for its own reasons, too, and I have a similar count of hours logged. Glacial pace of development and a lack of strong game design / sense for balance. I'm still stunned by how much of a selling point the background simulation was, and how limited it actually is in practice (it did get some love over the years, but far too little too late IMO.)
I really wanted to like it, but it just never scratched the itch when I played it. I love stuff like freespace 2, but E:D just never did it for me. Which sucks, because the community search thing sounded really fun at the time.
It annoyingly needs a more complex HOTAS to properly play than most cheap entry-level ones have, while also not having ENOUGH complex need to justify me pulling my godamn keyboard over for
Literally the main reason I don’t play it even though slapping my quest 2 on and space VR flying is fucking fun
I haven’t played E:D so I can’t really make comparisons, but maybe X3/X4 can pique your interest?
I don’t think they can justify a home cockpit setup, they’re also kinda hard to get into (especially X3, you can’t get far without a guide), but hey, there’s a combined 1.5% chance that you haven’t heard of them and that you’ll enjoy at least one of them if you don’t care much about graphics. Or voice acting. Or UI/UX.
X3 is a fun game, with a very developed universe (you’ll see factions conduct invasion in real-time as you do your own thing) with a wide variety of gameplay. The universe of X3 honestly makes Star Citizen seems like a theme park for children.
That being said it is extremely difficult to get into them both because there are so many gameplay options and the UI/UX is subpar (prepare to be constantly fiddling with menu and looking up how to execute a given course of action).
Yeah, I never even bought it after reading the reviews about how janky it is, I want to use a HOTAS and rudder pedals and it doesn’t sound possible in X4
I play it with hotas and it works fine. You’ll absolutely still want to keep a keyboard and mouse handy though because the RTS/management half of the game is really not that well controlled with a flight stick.
I couldn’t find a way to bind a double press in X4, so hold RB and tap X for example. These combinations are essential because there is no other way to use a controller to perform all of the necessary controls. It’s a shame because I would have invested a lot into the game if that was surmountable.
I tried binding in Steam but the controller settings in Steam are kind of terrible too. Half the time I don’t know what a setting does, and I feel like I need to do a training course to understand it. So I gave up and went back to Elite.
I didn’t blame you. Over the years I’ve seen some really impressive controller setting though. You can do a lot things with the steam settings. But yeah, you need to want to really invest in learning how to do it, and then actually remembering what you’ve set.
No, X is absolutely my type of game. Don’t blame me for the horrible controls and menus, I didn’t create that hot mess. It’s also a well complained about part of the game.
I remember how awesome Distant Worlds was, as a community event, and I wish I appreciated it more at the time. 65000 light years and back, I even bought a T-shirt and coin to commemorate the event lol o7
My big in game accomplishment was making it to SagA*, I spent some time in colonia and joined a discord of nerds that hung out there getting big exploration creds. I actually made the trek all the way back to the bubble after spending about a month in the galactic core. It was an epic adventure in my mind, but afterwards it was hard to be motivated for the engineering grind.
I sold my pledges off 9 years ago, the reason I even made a reddit account in the first place. Was getting disillusioned with it back then and I was super excited when I initially backed it, had a decent amount of ships in the hangar at the time, but felt like I was only ever going to see them in the hangar
It is the exact opposite of vapourware, even. They have over a thousand employees in multiple studios across the globe pushing out regular, massive updates.
So they have rounds of layoffs, staff feel less secure in their role, and they’re surprised that knowledgeable and easily employable experts are leaving for more stable roles?
All bs and scam atuff aside. This is what happens when you have a leader who never gets told no.
Dude never finished and feature krept freelancer too before Microsoft kicked him to the curb and finished it themselves.
Yep, feature creep is basically this entire dev cycle. Dude just keeps adding more and more and never really finishing anything. I grabbed the game on sale a few years ago, I have maybe 15 hours into it. It’s got stuff to do, but not what I would expect from the money and time that’s been spent on it.
At those time frames it’s not just feature creep you have to worry about, but tech- and social creep as well. Think back what games were popular 12 years ago and what hardware we had. That’s why usually in longterm, large scale projects you have a technological freeze, where you essentially ignore all progress made outside of your project for the sake of completion, which Star Citizen clearly hasn’t done.
This is the second time they’ve pointed out the size of valve. First total size, now steam specific. Is it some kinna dogwhistle to other companies that the size is a weakness to exploit? Cuz what layman cares about how many people work at a given company?
“Companies have too many employees!” cries the guy who will lose his job if all companies are run like Valve.
Them having few employees doesn’t prevent them from taking a 30% cut on all sales and making billions in profit and having a billionaire at their head, so are people expecting that if other companies were “trimming down some fat” it wouldn’t simply result in them making more profit because prices wouldn’t come down or something?
Also, a company can pretend to have 10 employees if it instead hires 1000 contractors to do the actual work.
There are no good billionaires, the reason they exist is because people like you and me are paying more for things than they’re truly worth, billionaires exist because of the surplus we pay.
the reason they exist is because people like you and me are paying more for things than they’re truly worth
There is no true worth, worth is defined by how much people are willing to spend on something, doesn’t matter how much something costs to produce and distribute
There’s a cost to producing things. All the overhead you’re being charged that ends up enriching investors and bosses that have so much money they wouldn’t be able to spend it if they tried? That’s money you could keep in your pocket.
Have you ever thought that maybe you evaluate that some things are worth a certain amount just because that’s what you’re used to seeing them sold for so in reality you just underestimate what your money is worth and how much you should be able to purchase with it? Because that’s exactly what’s happening, especially with digital goods, there’s no supply vs demand relationship here, there’s no rarity.
If bread sells for 5$ for long enough you’ll think you’re getting your money’s worth by getting it on sale for 4.50$ without realizing that it cost 2$ to make it, transport it and put it on the shelves and there’s still 2.50$ going to the grocery store owner. You were paying that bread 3$ a couple of years ago and at the time it cost 1.75$ to make, transport and store, but you’re ignoring all that because what’s important is that right now it’s 50¢ less than full price so you’re getting your money’s worth. Most of the surplus is going to a company that’s just making record profit year after year after year, but that record profit comes from somewhere. It went up 100% in a couple of years while the people who made, transported and put the bread on the shelves have seen their salary increase by 10% and you’ve seen what you spend on grocery increase by 66%, but hey, you’re getting your money’s worth and the price is fair because that’s what people accept to be paying, right?
I don’t know where this contractor bullshit is coming from; if anything that should be aimed at Microsoft.
TBF, Valve does hire contractors to help work on Proton and Steam OS. I have no idea what the terms and compensation are, I’m just pointing out that they do hire contractors
A lot of companies have been trying to sue them and are trying to tarnish their name in any way possible because their case is already shaky at best. The whole “monopoly” thing despite competition existing and Valve only being on top because they’re the best feature wise stuff.
Exactly. It’s hard to argue that Steam has a monopoly when the other launchers exist and suck. Steam, despite its flaws, is still the best storefront we have. Gabe is the person who taught us that piracy is largely a service problem, not a price problem. People will pay when the paid option is quality.
I really don't think it was that secret. Every modern Ubisoft game I've played has had multiple unskippable TOS checkboxes that you had to agree to before you can even pass the title screen, which state in no uncertain terms that they're going to datamine the shit out of your entire play session.
It is still nice to see this stuff being challenged, though, even though I'm doubtful that it'll bring about any meaningful change.
You don’t want to play in a sandbox with threeish worlds of actual content and another 900+ of randomly generated garbage missions/barren worlds/mass effect 1 terrain ‘exploration’?
I think the title is a joke about how Bethesda games are notoriously always full of bugs. Like, to the point that it's just expected for any new Bethesda game to be a bug-riddled mess at launch.
Hell, there are still bugs in Skyrim that never got patched, even after they re-released it onto modern platforms. Not even obscure bugs, but things normal players will encounter in their playthroughs.
It’s crazy that they haven’t used things like the unofficial patch to fix their own damn game. Like they could pretty much just copy paste that shit and be fine. But no. More than a decade later and that shit is still around and even propagated to things like FO4 and FO76.
That’s still orders of magnitude easier than figuring it out from first principles, and nowhere near arduous enough to excuse leaving the problems unaddressed.
It's not that simple. Even using it as a base gets you into a legal gray area. Learning from a work and incorporating elements into your own work is legal, but copying someone else's legwork like this is legally murky even if you don't take the actual code.
Yeah I’m sure Microsoft-owned Bethesda is shaking in their boots about learning from modifications to their own game. That’s gotta be everything stays buggy.
If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.
If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.
If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person’s code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn’t been noticed or isn’t being pursued because there’s not likely any money in it anyways.
It’s that murky area that I’m guessing they’d want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.
Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)
Hiring the modder is not necessary, to look at a mod, go ‘oh that’s what we did wrong,’ and fix it. That’s not the ctrl+c/ctrl+v situation you seem to expect. And considering it’s their own game, and fixing bugs, the legal concerns are practically nonexistent.
If an employee writes code for a company, that employee owns the copyright.
For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else’s invention.
Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn’t gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don’t agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don’t think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.
That’s not to say that it’s legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there’s just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.
Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.
There’s copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There’s parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn’t use copy/paste). And there’s precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).
He’s saying the “Least buggiest” is not proper phrasing. It should be something along the lines of “the least buggy/bugged” and it’s a pretty bad title for someone claiming to be a “journalist”.
Doesn’t matter what he claims, he just wrote an article for a publishing/news/media company. That’s called journalism, professional or not.
jour·nal·ism /ˈjərnlˌizəm/ noun the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast. “she had begun a career in journalism”
It doesn’t have to be “proper” if it works as a joke. It implies that a Bethesda game can’t be merely “buggy,” it must be the “buggiest,” even if it’s (paradoxically) less buggy. So, “least buggiest.”
I seems in general journalism has gotten worse and worse with their grammar. I honestly wonder if their editors even look at even the title before things are posted online.
When I used to do copywriting for junk SEO, I began to suspect that my editor didn’t actually read anything I wrote and just passed it through a content uniquness filter, so I started putting in random references to HP Lovecraft stories in the articles I got assigned.
They all got published, no questions asked. For a while if you searched “Homeopathy and the Esoteric Cult of Dagon” my content was the only result
I imagine that LLMs have been trained on his reviews by this point and are vigorously producing articles exploring the intersection of pop gaming and the Elder Things.
Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn’t make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.
Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.
I’ve read reports that people can’t get more than 30fps on low settings on 4000 series cards. I’m definitely not one to expect sweet 120fps on ultra on launch day, but a 4000 card not even getting low settings? They failed. Hard.
I mean, Cuphead is one of the more visually impressive games… ever. It has an art style and it works it to the fullest extent. And Silksong is also quite gorgeous.
This comes up every other year or so it seems. People think 2D means “low effort” and get angry that so many fighting games moved on to 3D. But the reality is that actually making sprites is a VERY labor intensive process that often requires a deep understanding of the entire rendering pipeline (including the hardware it is displayed on). At this point, “most” online people are aware that many of the NES/SNES sprites were specifically made with CRT “blurring” in mind but it goes way beyond that. So that is why franchises like Street Fighter just have “generic” 3d models.
And ArcSys more or less made their entire model (wait for it) simple-ish 3d models with cell shading and very specific lighting systems to appear 2D even though they aren’t. Which is why stuff like the super attacks always look so impressive as you do the zoom and spin around.
I can’t speak for blands 4 since 3 (and the pre-sequel…) were so aggressively obnoxious that I just replay 2 every 3 or 4 years. But just look at this thread where you have weirdos saying that UE5 games look like they are from 2016. People are deeply stupid and games need to pop and sizzle to stand out. And while I don’t know (or care) if blands 4 succeeded… just look at ArcSys for how you can use modern engines to make cellshaded 3d models look AMAZING.
It is very specifically for actually 2D games, but check out some of Cobra Code’s videos on youtube. They have put a LOT of work into how to use UE5 to make sprite based 2D games look GOOD and it is actually fascinating. And that is still sidestepping the initial sprite work for the most part.
And as another example of why sprites are actually a ridiculous amount of work to get right. Mina The Hollower (?) is the latest game from the Shovel Knight devs. And… most of us who tried the demo on a high resolution display felt REALLY weird because of the way the sprites and animations looked upscaled (I saw a breakdown of why. I did not understand it). The devs are putting in the work to fix that ahead of launch but it really speaks to the kinds of problems that come up when you go from testing on a Steam Deck or in a debug window to stretched across a 1440p display at 120-ish Hz.
I’ve been playing since the 12th, it hasn’t gotten better since then and my friend who got it day one hasn’t said anything about updates improving the performance.
I’m definitely not one to expect sweet 120fps on ultra on launch day
I fucking am. I didn’t pay $1700 for a graphics card to have potato graphics. I’m glad there’s been plenty of bad press on this, not that I would have bought it this close to launch anyway.
No, I disagree with that. It’s always been perfectly normal to have ultra graphics a bit out of reach so that the game will look great on future graphics cards, and 120fps is a ridiculously high number that should never be expected even with top of the line graphics cards for a brand new release. (Assuming 2 or 4k)
However, a 1 generation out of date graphics card should be able to easily play most things on High settings at a decent framerate (aiming for 60) on 4k settings, which Borderlands failed at horribly. Medium to low settings on a 4000 series card sounds like a gutpunch to me.
You can’t even talk about different games while playing certain ones, like what bullshit is that? I really feel like corporations are policing people’s lives nowadays, what with Nintendo being shitty to everyone, CoD not letting you talk about certain other games in-game, YouTube and other social media companies censoring any goddamn word that has even the slightest negative connotations (kill, suicide, pedophile, etc.}
Like the world just feels so infantilized and people can’t actually be people anymore, like we all need to be told what to do.
And in the end, I think it could all be explained with the rise of fascism literally everywhere right now. This world and existence fuckin sucks.
Those are a few different incentive systems in place. YouTube does what it does to be friendly to advertisers. Call of Duty does what it does because they’re too stupid to realize that censoring mention of your competitors actually draws more attention to them. But you’re here on Lemmy right now, presumably, because you were fed up with something on reddit and decided to move, and you can do the same with which video games you play.
But then we have the indie devs that constantly praise each other, include in-game references to their inspirations or blog about what blast they’re having while playing a competitors game.
I doubt they have a huge marketing budget. Perhaps they‘re using it in a clever way but I doubt Nexon bets everything on 0 here when The Finals only did ok. Extraction shooters is a niche that‘s starving for content. Somehow it gained a reputation for being everywhere when in reality there don‘t even exist 5 of them with a decent player size. The shooter genre is huge and people want something that isn‘t just a battle royale for once.
It may be that some games are dropping the ball and so players are looking to flock somewhere else.
For example, Helldivers 2 has some loud complainers who advertised both Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders as potential alternates.
Word of mouth can do a lot of damage if the mouth is loud and persistent enough.
The Microsoft Store and how to redeem games is so mind-numbly stupid. GamePass wowed me with their library and the subscription service. But how they do everything, from DRMing their games in a absolute mindfuckery app folder, to locking it into your Microsoft account and ecosystem, was so frustrating. Modding? Eat a Microdick. Hell, save files don’t even transfer between Steam and Microsoft GamePass games because FUCK YOU PLAYERS.
I’m glad Steam was extremely proactive at moving off of Windows.
Well large corporations are at least 50% dead weight by volume, weighted overwhelmingly in management and at the executive level. So naturally it’s the ones doing all the ACTUAL work who get terminated whenever the line isn’t going up hard enough. Capitalism folks, it’s doomed us all and there’s no way we can fix it and those who could never will.
It becomes even more confusing when you think about the fact that the Xbox One is not the Xbox 1, which was just the Xbox. And that the Xbox One X, the souped up version of the Xbox One, can be abbreviated as the XBOX, which again, is not the original Xbox.
Not really. If you were going to buy an xbox, you would either just buy the cheaper version, the more expensive version assuming its just better, or look up the difference.
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