This may be a shocker but games on the same level of scope as Cyberpunk 2077 take years of effort to make. We simply cannot pump them out as fast as consumers and shareholders demand their release.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky. Ubisoft also did with both Division games.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.
Having played at release, Hello Game’s issue was much less “large scope games take long to make” and much more “we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game”.
Features that had to be cut because they lack the time to implement it, so basically “large scope games take too long to make”.
One feature was also removed because of player feedback, so the issue there is talking about features before they were tested. This issue stems from their lack of PR expertise, but it means they weren’t lying when they said it.
Except weren’t they still promoting those features at launch? And they had taken preorders before review embargoes were lifted.
Both No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk both had dishonest marketing and significant bugs. Call me crazy, but if a game isn’t ready to launch, it shouldn’t launch. The developer sets the launch date, and if they didn’t give themselves enough time, it’s not reasonable to ask the people who have paid for he thing as advertised to wait because they couldn’t deliver the features as promised.
As much fun as I’m having with starfield(150 hours since September 1st, because yes I pre-ordered but it was also the first time I’d pre ordered a game in a very very long time ) that was my take on a lot of its issues. I won’t say they did no QA playthrough but it certainly feels like they didn’t do enough and that was after delaying the game even for like an additional 2 years. Supposedly they were all set to launch the game in late 2021 but Phil Spencer paid them to work on bug fixes for longer. Then nonsensical design choices like not having med pack counters where your grenade counter is or a “current equiped power” info area above your current equiped weapon info area on the HUD in 2021 or 2023 is laughably unthinkable. But the meat of the game has been worth the questionable sourced veggie “bugs” on the burger as a whole imo.
You See advertisements for a big, thick, juicy black angus burger. Stacked with garden fresh tomato, lettuce, onion, with a side of the best onion rings man can make, for an ultra premium price (at least for those who actually paid money for it, Some of us got it free with a different purchase, and arent so heavily invested in it financially that we’re more free to criticize it, and the ridiculous price for what you get)
So you buy it
and what you got was a thin patty with a texture and taste that doesnt match any of your expectations of meat, much less black angus. The greenery is small, disappointing, and utterly tasteless and completely missable if you didnt open bun to go hunt for it… and instead of onion rings, you got some weird, oily, deep fried brussel sprouts instead.
and the Chef comes out and tells you “Of course the burgers mostly empy. We made it that way because the universe is mostly empty. Get used to it and upgrade your expectations”
Some people might be able to force themselves to enjoy that burger, by throwing salt and pepper and whatever else they can on the bland, tasteless, amorphus “meat”, but that doesnt mean its a super premium burger. and it certainly doestnt mean that its what you were sold, and ordered.
The worst thing about Stadia was the squandered opportunities. Had Google actually put some effort into marketing it, it could have really succeeded. The tech behind it worked amazingly well. I played Destiny 2 on it from launch to the service's shutdown, and it was a fantastic experience. The latency was nowhere near as bad as people (who often never even tried the platform) would claim, and it was also the best place to play Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, as it was somehow the most stable version of the game. Streaming to YouTube worked very well, and some of the integrated features with YouTube (where viewers could interact with certain games) were also kinda groundbreaking.
But somehow, Google couldn't be bothered to advertise the product at all. They ran 1 Super Bowl commercial which didn't make a whole lot of sense to the average viewer, and then basically zero marketing after that. They refused to inform the public about what the product is or how it worked or what stood it apart from its competition, which led to bad-faith reviews and rumors being spread about the platform, ultimately leading to most people who knew about Stadia being wildly misinformed on it.
It's such a shame. I absolutely loved Stadia. It fit my needs perfectly. None of the other streaming platforms I've tried have even come close, even today.
Yeah a product like that needs a Big Personality to be a sort of spokesperson for it. To go around and do the press circuit, and be the face of the product. Get memed, etc.
My guess is it was just a bunch of well meaning nerds behind this one, and no one wanted to actually go out there and bat for it.
But you don’t need PS+ for Spider-Man and Horizon? And you could buy and sell the console + games after playing the two games you wanted to play on the platform.
It’s not as convenient as just streaming the games, but it is possible.
I wouldnt call a PS4 e-waste, if the PS2 is anything to go by it will end up cycling about for a long time in some shape or form. Seriously PS2 parts are a solid mix of old new stock, newly manufactured parts, or spares taken from scrapped dead consoles.
Regular use is irrelevant so long as it doesnt end up in a land fill, what matters is that they get some continued use and survive in solid enough numbers.
Eh, I will still be able to play the base game of say far cry 4 or assassins creed black flag. I have the disks, and even then you could always buy the versions that have all the dlc. Nobody talks about the fable 1 dlc but they existed.
Unless its a multiplayer focused game there will always be games to play on it, even if ya dont get the DLC.
Would’ve loved a streaming platform that doesn’t cost a whole console in a year in subscription fees + makes you pay for the games
Stadia's subscription service wouldn't have cost more than a console for several years. It was only $10/month, and also not required to play the games or use multiplayer.
It would've taken over 4 years for Stadia Pro's subscription costs to reach the price of a PS5, not even including a PS+ subscription. And during that time, you'd have been able to claim ~150 free games. Realistically, Stadia had the potential to be more economic than buying a console.
I got one, was super disappointed with the functionality and didn’t like it at all. Returned it in less than a week. I got it after it’d already been steeply discounted and was so glad I hated it and got a refund when they killed it…
After committing to several Google services only to have them shut down I wasn’t willing to risk it again.
Did they refund the subscription fee? If I knew they’d refund it all, I might not have cancelled my pro preorder.
I was willing to potentially be let down again but once I heard you had to buy almost all your own games (again, if you already own them) to play them on the service I cancelled. I was aware that they’d give you Destiny (a game I have zero interest in, especially with a controller) for free. I didn’t seem worth sinking money into the service.
The subscription fee was for a gamepass-like access to a catalog of free games, so they didn’t refund that. The subscription fee also wasn’t required for playing purchased games (although it was required for 4K quality).
especially with a controller
I mostly used keyboard and mouse with the service, since the games I like to play tend to work better with keyboard and mouse. I had a dinky underpowered laptop but was playing AAA PC-oriented games through the browser interface. It was great.
I’m on GeForce Now these days but I find that it doesn’t work quite as seamlessly as Stadia did.
It was not advertised as a game-pass like catalog when I was cancelling my preorder. I literally cancelled because it wasn’t that. It was Destiny and 4k 60Hz with TBD games coming in later months.
I only had a gaming computer and a Shield TV so Stadia would have been pointless for me unless it was in the living room with a controller and some interesting games.
I pulled them all from Google Takeout. Most of them are unusable unless I figure out how to convert them to a state that can be read by other platforms, but at least I still have them, for such a day.
But somehow, Google couldn’t be bothered to advertise the product at all. They ran 1 Super Bowl commercial which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to the average viewer, and then basically zero marketing after that.
Google is really bad at marketing despite being an advertising company. Most of the products they’ve launched then shut down I just never heard of, despite finding the ideas behind them really enticing after the fact.
In my experience it was pretty shit. While visiting family in Minnesota, I got a better experience using Steam remote play to my desktop in Seattle than I did using Stadia, both in terms of latency and visual quality. I’m sure it would have been better living in California or New York, where you’re closer to a datacenter. But Doom Eternal was just unplayable for me.
Despite Google being heavily invested in the advertising space, they have always been terrible at advertising their own products. It almost seems like the top brass don’t actually care about their non-search products at all.
Google couldn’t be bothered to advertise the product at all. Except, apparently, to me specifically. I must have seen the same handful of Stadia advertisements literally 100+ times while watching YouTube. I got very sick of it after a certain point.
They can’t, but if you don’t give you password and safety codes away before you die they can’t legally let you transfer ownership of the games. Just don’t tell them and arrange for all your emails, security keys, and 2FA keys to be safely transfered to your children.
Damn…makes me want to take the time to pirate games I already bought and own…
And then write it in my will that those who inherit my few earthly possessions have to play through each of my games at least once in front of a lawyer in order to receive their inheritance. Lol, I kid, 😂…or am I 😈?
spoiler alert though, it’s literally everybody. because everyone else is doing it, it’s not possible to survive as a business in a competitive space without doing, for lack of a better word, the devil’s work. It will take a major social disruption to change this, but it won’t happen in an organized fashion because we as a species are pathetic. The disruption will be the end of the world - North America cracking down the middle due to all the fracking, the Greenland glacier sliding into the ocean all at a go, something like that. FAFO endgame shit, due any minute now anyway.
Valve is trying to escape Microsoft’s monopolistic practices with Linux while out performing their competition in a fair market. I like competition but I don’t get what advantage steam has that their competition doesn’t. Even with the steam deck they’re using standardized hardware and open source software to make a competitive product leaving room for competition to create their own versions.
One can appreciate Valve’s contributions to Linux gaming without idealizing them. The likely reason they went for Linux is that they would have to pay Microsoft to use Windows.
This is true that it is a likely reason. It is also possible that Gabe Newell runs his company in a very deliberate way because he thinks it’s a net benefit to both his company and gaming in general. From what I have heard, which of course may be a flawed understanding of the man, it seems like he has certain principles. I guess the question is whether or not a person believes intent matters or only the end result.
I don’t idealize them, I use the other storefronts (gog epic) potentially more because they often don’t sell games with any form of drm. I just don’t get it because as far as my experience goes they’re all about the same minus more jank on the other two.
I’ve actually spent the most time with Rockstar games launcher thanks to GTA V and RDR2 and that one is a real piece of work tbh.
Steam has a large userbase, which offers a lot of consumer inertia to prefer games on Steam. They also have a policy where game pricing on other platforms cannot undercut Steam.
The main complaint is that this pricing policy coupled with the consumer inertia makes it difficult for other gaming marketplaces to enter the market. You cannot undercut steam unless a publisher wants to not put their game on Steam at all (which would be suicide for anything but the largest titles), so you have to sell at Steam’s price point. Few platforms could match Steams’ established workshop, multiplayer, streaming, and social services; all of which benefit from costs at scale and the established user content.
Imagine trying to convince a user: “Buy your game here instead. It will cost the same as on Steam. No, you won’t have access to the existing Workshop. No, you won’t have in-platform multiplayer with your Steam friends.” Even if you had feature parity, people would prefer Steam since that’s where their existing games and friends are.
Note that the main argument Wolfire is making is that game marketplaces (buy/download the game) and game platforms (online features, mod distribution, social pages) need to be decoupled. By integrating the two, Steam is vertically integrating, amortizing the cost, and then forcing every other marketplace to bear the cost of a platform in their pricing.
If you bought a game and paid for platform services separately, then competition can better exist for both of those roles. Which is good for consumers.
I’m going to be real, the seperatization might be good technically from a consumer standpoint, but mostly will just prove to make consumers lives harder for no reason. One of the major benefits of Steam is that it handles everything, and isn’t something I, or anyone else, would be happy to give up.
I typically try to buy games from gog if available and on epic if not and steam if it’s on sale. The only harm I see is how janky the other storefronts are and how frequently they break or refuse to load and that’s not steams fault. I don’t play a lot of online games but epic and gog are my primary platforms to play on.
I’m not defending steam but I also don’t see how the advantage a platform like steam has is a direct result of any anti consumer practices. Honestly I prefer a storefront over rootkits and heavy handed drm any day not to mention downloading gamepatches directly from the publishers website.
Disclaimer: My comment is a reaction to the stuff Todd and his minions said in the article, not necessarily about the game itself. I haven’t played Starfield yet. I just find the statements really weak and want to express why I see it that way.
Yeaaahh that’s nice for maybe a couple of hours, but then it starts to get boring. That’s not how you keep players engaged, although there are of course those who don’t find that boring at all.
We’re not astronauts, we’re not there. Astronauts had the thrill of the voyage through space, stepping on the moon and feeling with ones own body how it is to walk on the moon’s dust in low gravity. Also astronauts had and have a shitload of scientific equipment and experiments to carry out, i.e., a purpose beyond the mere jolly walking.
If they were just there for walking and that for days, weeks, months, they would get bored pretty fast as well.
Take a look at No Man’s Sky. Similar problem. The procedural generation algorithm made planets look familiar after you’ve seen a couple. There is nothing new. Exploration became unrewarded. But Hello Games has massively improved on that over the years and produced a game where you can sink dozens of hours without getting bored so easily.
No Man’s Sky still has the same problem it began with, although the landscapes are vastly improved. It doesn’t matter what planet it is, there’s nothing to distinguish it from the last planet other than what species owns the system, the flavor of hazard present, and the overall color.
No Man’s Sky honestly has not enough planets with just dead barren empty planets. At least in Starfield, there’s some magic in seeing actual fauna. You don’t get that feeling in No Man’s Sky because you’ve seen fauna and flora on the last 30 planets you’ve been to. You need those empty planets to make the planets with life actually feel special.
No Man’s Sky still has the same problem it began with, although the landscapes are vastly improved. It doesn’t matter what planet it is, there’s nothing to distinguish it from the last planet other than what species owns the system, the flavor of hazard present, and the overall color.
Regarding the variety and interesting features of the bare planets, I tend to agree. My point was rather that there is more to do now and the fun with - even familiar planets - lasts longer.
No Man’s Sky honestly has not enough planets with just dead barren empty planets.
This is not correct. The amount of more dead planets immensely depends on - spoiler alert -
spoilerthe galaxy you’re in. NMS has different galaxies with different distributions for lush or dead planets. This also has some effects on the difficulty.
You don’t need to. There are different possibilities for switching galaxies. The simplest ones would be to use portals which is accessible very early in the game.
Okay, but from my understanding, in order to change galaxies, I have to find a portal, figure however to use the portal, and then switch galaxies.
For someone whose put in a few hours into the game multiple times as the game has been steadily updated, I didn’t know about portals or even that switching galaxies was even a thing. So telling me I’m incorrect because it’s NG+ COULD have fixed it for me is pretty disingenuous. How am I suppose to know that after going through 6 more galaxies that I can get what I wanted from the start?
Okay, but from my understanding, in order to change galaxies, I have to find a portal, figure however to use the portal, and then switch galaxies.
As soon as you can use the space anomaly (which happens very early) you already have a possibility. But apart from that, sure, it still takes a bit of effort and is not an option available when starting the game. The latter would be a nice idea though.
I didn’t know about portals or even that switching galaxies was even a thing. […] How am I suppose to know that after going through 6 more galaxies that I can get what I wanted from the start?
By using an internet search engine of your choice.
But I get what you mean as this is not clearly communicated right from the beginning in the game and something to be discovered. So your best chance to know this, besides doing the story missions, is to talk to other players or by curiously clicking on some suitable links in the NMS wiki.
The planets being mostly empty is fine. In fact, I think they’re too full if anything. You’re not meant to travel on the planet’s surface for long. You explore a bit if you think you want to build an outpost there, but otherwise you just move on. Most of the “content” is in pre-built areas. Enemy encounters almost always take place in hand crafted facilities, and usually it’ll be for some kind of quest so you land right near it.
The outpost system is where the procedural planets come in. You need to explore some to find the right spot to build with the resources you want. The content there is the building, not the planet. The landscape will effect it some, but mostly it’s whatever you make of it.
That said, the outpost system fucking sucks right now. You have to send resources between outposts with “links”, which take goods into a container and store them in linked containers. All solid goods go in one type, and the same for liquid, gas, and manufactured. I have all of my resources trickling into a main base, so I have all resources available there. This has caused my storage to back up and there’s no way to filter out items you don’t want. Then no resources can come in so you have to go to your storage and clear whatever is clogging it. There’s also no way to delete items as far as I’m aware, so you just dump the excess resources on the ground where they’ll remain forever. It’s really stupid. This is my storage solution for now.
All the crates flow into the next one, so it’s functionally one massive storage container, but with 15 seperate inventories I have to go through to get anything out. There’s also no stairs object you can build, or anything like it, so I stacked cabinets into a sort of access staircase. It’s really bad, but it’s what works for now.
Just a tip if you start playing and build a main base, build it on a low gravity planet so you don’t have as much of a problem if you stack stuff like this.
At least if the Telvanni got their way I’d be able to levitate up to my crates! (I just realized, I may TCL to use the crates because there isn’t a good alternative built into the game systems.)
Yeah, outposts seemed to me to be the thing that Starfield was designed and marketed around, but it’s so jank. So many basic things missing and so many quality of life failures. It’s like they didn’t even test it themselves first.
There’s one part in the story that you need to build a thing in a shop or an outpost, but it doesn’t require you to really build an outpost. I did it so I can have any supplies for upgrading things without too much effort. I think that was a mistake, but now I’m too invested. Lol.
That reminds me of how annoyed I get with Satisfactory as well…
As a Factorio player, this could all be handled so much better in both games, but Starfield is particularly bad. It’s like they never even tried building outposts before launch. So many basic functions are missing.
Yeah, and without any way to actually manage the resources. I want to like it, but I see so many issues that should be easy to solve that they just didn’t. Sure, it’ll be fixed with mods and maybe DLC, but that shouldn’t be required for basic UX.
Another one of my big gripes with outposts is that there is no way to view your existing outposts. There’s not a list, and definitely no way to view what an outpost is producing. Hell, you can’t even view what an outpost is producing when you’re there. It’ll tell you the total quantity produced of everything combined, but not of what. It’s bad.
I’ve played Starfield and it’s fantastic. There’s so much story. The world-bulding is different because there’s literally 1000+ worlds and they’re mostly uninhabited. I’m not sure what else you would expect. There are some huge, in-depth cities and some beautiful landscapes. But there’s also empty deserts and plains, just like we see everywhere in space.
Yeah, the first thing I did when getting to the core was to generate an ancestral galaxy so that there would be more dead worlds. Didn’t like having every place overrun with life.
2: Of course every outlet that can write about Cyberpunk is going to right now. It's what people are searching for. They want clicks on fresh content that is relevant to their readers' interests.
This is one of the saddest stories in gaming. Author was depressed and friends help him create a game. Game is considered one of the greatest games ever created only the publisher screws original team out of the rights to the game mimicking the exact type of short sighted bullshit that creatives have to deal within the Disco Elysium world.
Probably my favorite game maybe because of some similarities with the main character I loved the redemption arc. I loved the capitalist socialist critiques. I wish more games would focus on that dichotomy.
Deciding how to invest my resources, where to expand, when to attack, defend, or retreat, scouting and countering my opponent’s plans…
…but when it comes to the physical act of doing this stuff, it feels so horribly awkward that it’s like I’m fighting the UI more than my opponent.
Clicking and dragging selection boxes as if my troops are always in a rectangle formation? Right-clicking to attack but accidentally moving instead… And ugh, the endless series of tedious build queues.
The actual mechanics feel more like data entry — the kind with real bad RSI — than military leadership.
FYI, there are a handful of games that put unique spins on the genre out there. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head put you in control of a “cursor character” that’s like a commander. It puts a speed limit on APM, which I think gets the genre back to focusing on strategy. There’s also Northgard, which is like a cross between an RTS and a 4X game, and pieces of the map are tile-like, so rather than this unit moving to these coordinates, you’re commanding a unit to move from this tile to the one next to it. Then there’s the Total War series, where the battles are slow paced, and the macro level resources are handled in turn-based strategy.
Mount and Blade (Warband, WFAS, and Bannerlord) is another that I would say puts a unique spin on RTS. You are down on the ground with your troops and need to give orders like when to have certain troop groups attack, retreat, change formation, etc. You have the opportunity for your own skill as a fighter to matter, but once the battles reach a certain size, it becomes far more important to have a tactical advantage than to just be good at fighting yourself.
You may enjoy Zero-K more than most other RTS, at least. It’s in the Total Annihilation style like Supreme Commander or Beyond All Reason. One of the ways it sets itself apart is with a diverse array of commands you can issue to your units so they can micro themselves. I haven’t played much of it, so I can’t give a ton of examples, but it has commands to do stuff attack while maintaining distance, compared to how StarCraft 2 forced you to learn to stutter step your Marines, manually alternating between moving and shooting.
It’s also free and open source, based on the Spring engine, and available on Steam. It felt like it played well and was filled out well in terms of mechanics and units when I gave it a try a year or so ago, but I just haven’t been playing any RTS lately.
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