TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
In their defense I don’t think they could have come up with any standard chat lines that wouldn’t be used sarcastically by toxic players.
If I was a dev if you spammed the lines 3 times in a row I’d change the third one to something to diffuse the hate, from a random selection of lines that are hard to take sarcastically. "I love you! ", “Wooo!”, etc
I bought the game about 6 months after it was released and I had over 3000 hours in that game before I stopped playing a few years back.
The first 1200+ hours was in Snowday alone, and I doubt I’ll ever have as much fun in a video game than I did in that mode. I started to play all the modes plus the steam workshop mods (for hundreds of hours) just to get better car control to play Snowday.
Unfortunately at the end it was all competitive and it had started to be more of a chore than fun but I stand by those first thousands of hours at the most fun I’ve ever had.
Hell, most of the time even the losing part of Snowday was enjoyable when playing against and with the right people.
Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.
The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.
Im completely oblivious to any of the enshittification, but like any online game the fun is long gone for most people. Skill floor is way too high. As soon as you join a match youre completely outskilled by everybody and its clear youre nothing but a hindrance to your team.
Your opponents laugh at you and style as hard as they can and your teammates resent your existence, assuming they stick around long enough to make it clear.
Hyper-competitive games are fun for about 3 months and then youre either in or out.
Yeah agreed. Best time to get into most competition games is when they’re in their ‘growing playerbase’ phase with lots of new players, still room for casual players. Then they slowly get pushed out.
There’s room for modes that encourage casual fun though to keep that part of the playerbase active, which is what made Psyonix’s decisions so frustrating.
But how does controlling the karts feel there? Last I tried STK (~2017), the controls felt floaty as fuck, like there was no gravity or friction between karts and the ground
If screeching puritans are going to get mad about some people liking to look at pretty ladies saving humanity from monsters (but who is the monster, really), maybe reconsider playing into the reactionary gameplan so enthusiastically.
It’s hardly a patriarchal work. Eve is a badass respected for her skills working on behalf of The Mother Sphere… And who only wears stripper gear if that’s what the player wants. The difference between this and Bayonetta, for example, is that you’ve decided to react exactly the way the conservatives want you to.
Now, if you want to talk about how they very clearly edited out some serious homophobia for the English release that’s another thing but Korea gonna Korea
The vid I linked to basically said that the game is ok but derivative and not that great. The main point he was making is to point out how the “controversy” around the game doesn’t actually exist. It’s a bunch of made up crap by grifters to make idiots foam at the mouth. And it worked. And now these idiots think Stellar Blade is the next coming of Christ and the bullwark against the woke mind virus games blah blah blah…
Misogyny in stuff can be really complicated. Sometimes you can only really see it holistically, and sometimes it’s only in specifics. Sometimes a story will give a woman a lot of focus, place her feelings and emotions in the spotlight and give her actions the most agency and power over the plot- while also having her be inexplicably dressed in lingerie the whole time with a really weak excuse, if any.
Like, I love FF12. Ashe is undisputably the actual main character in it, and her story is about being a person with authority in a time of war. It’s about grappling with your own grief and desire for revenge, trying to keep in mind your principles and what you believe in. It somehow manages to be both about the divine right of kings and weapons of mass destruction and maintained it’s emotional thru line almost all the way to the end!
But also, Ashe, that hot pink mini-skirt? Girrrrrl, WTF, you live in a desert. You’re gonna fight things in a skirt made of two pink napkins? There’s no real reason for her to dress like that, and it’s definitely just for fan service!
I still love the game, but I acknowledge that it has that problem. It objectifies women because it treats them as visual treats and has them dress in bizzare ways that don’t flow adequately from their characterization. This is because of structural societal things, and it sucks for a bunch of reasons.
Bayonetta is different primarily because the work’s themes are, as I understand them, incredibly positive about women being active, powerful sexual people who do what they want.
B dresses like that because she likes being hot, and it’s a characterization tool, and it’s never a disempowering thing for her.
Like, Kill la Kill has ridiculous outfits, but I’ve had multiple women tell me they love it because of how it intersects with things they like. I wasn’t going to watch it until one of them insisted and, yeah, it’s pretty good. The sexual elements are intended and used as part of the narrative, and the emotional thru line is very strong.
So, it’s one of those things that needs an exhaustive breakdown to really know about in a work. I don’t know enough about this one to say, and I’m just commented in hopes that it’s useful for you or someone else looking at doing media analysis of this type.
I couldn’t make it through the whole 2hr essay, but I can’t disagree with some of his criticisms of the game. It’s just that they never bothered me, and I found the AAish quality of the game really cozy.
I completely agree with him about just how manufactured the “woke outrage” seemed to be, though. I just fundamentally believe “woke” lost its meaning some time ago and doesn’t really define anything anymore. It is really handy for letting mindless culture-warrior types flag themselves, though. I certainly doubt the IGN article was the ONLY article criticizing eve’s character design, but I think it served as a great example of just how far up their own asses the anti-woke crowd love to be.
I’m forced to agree. It feels weird to do so, but, I guess yeah- the thing which should be focused on is the how and why of this and not just focus on the puritan disgust angle.
I’ve seen the Shaun video (linked in these replies somewhere) so I’m familiar with what’s going on socially around this video game. Being upset because of misogynistic objectification is appropriate, but sex isn’t inherently bad.
Not much to understand. A chunk is a small part of a map. People do challenges to do everything in a chunk then move to the next. This guy chose a part of a map that took hundreds of hours to complete and did it.
Have you heard of Cookie Clicker? It’s an idler game where you click a cookie to get points. You can spend those points on upgrades like automated clicking and more points per click. The goal is to get like a billion points or something but with the upgrades you’re eventually getting millions of points a second without even clicking. Now imagine saying “I want to hit a billion points without buying a single upgrade. I’m literally just going to click the cookie a billion times.” That’s what this guy did, but with Old School Runescape.
There’s been a trend of extreme OSRS players trying to one up each other in dedicating years of their life to doing a repetitive task for 18 hours a day, every day.
I stopped playing when they decided to require an Epic account to log in years AFTER I bought the game on Steam. It shouldn’t be allowed to alter the terms and conditions in that way afterwards. I bought the game on steam to play it on Steam and wouldn’t have otherwise if a third party account would’ve been necessary.
I didn’t like it either, but you could still play locally against ai without it, it was their online matchmaking and game servers that required the new epic account.
Still sucks, but it’s not quite the same rug pull that’s often seen.
I’ve been modding games and making mods for games since before Nexus or SteamWorkshop or anything even existed… I guess people just genuinely have never even heard of moddb these days, like how gamefaqs is an ‘ancient relic’ or w/e.
basically just a huge compendium of everywhere all kinds of mods for anything are hosted, that’ll give you an idea of how the game modding scene is actually rather dispersed, not only monopolized by nexusmods.
not sure if its in this huge list but:
fpsbanana
is another one i am quite familiar with, been going strong with mostly source mods… possibly since the late 90s, at the least the early 2000’s.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne