One of those games I intended to check out for a couple hours, but have spent way longer than I’m willing to admit chilling and chatting while in between things.
I don’t know, it just looks like a €50 stand-alone expansion that could’ve been DLC for the first game. But now they get to sell it for more, and add new/more individual smaller DLC for this one.
Not been much of a fan of Frontier ever since Braben left. They started focusing very heavily on paid DLC since, especially back when for Elite Dangerous it was first just cosmetics, but they got greedy and now have paid early access for new ships, after the game was content starved for years. And before that instead of focusing on new content there was a long period where the only thing that got updated was a new microstransaction currency and raised prices of the DLC.
Doesn’t feel much different with the Planet Coaster and Zoo games. They get littered with paid DLC, and it’s almost taking The Sims forms of additional paid content.
As much as I hate being a corporate shill: ask yourself this. Is the game worth the asking price with no DLC? You don’t have to buy every DLC, that’s just the cost of the additional game development time. And maybe the game isn’t worth the price now, but in two years you can probably pick it and a few of the best DLCs up for the same price as it is now and get your money’s worth.
Well I got the game back when it came out. I did not know the game would be leaning so heavily on paid content after that, so it often felt like missing out on new stuff. It was the same with Elite Dangerous, I backed that from Kickstarter, and then they pull shit like that paid early access content.
I’d say I easily got my money’s worth out of both games for what I paid at the time. But it still feels like being screwed over when they start putting price tags on all new content. And it’s often not even a lot of content that justifies the price tag. Compare this to games like No Man’s Sky, that get free updates quite often.
I think this would’ve bothered me far less had the base games been free to play games, and then charge for DLC. To me Frontier turned into a greedy company so fast, it’s really up there with EA, Blizzard Activision and Epic.
You nailed to describe my frustration with Frontier perfectly. They really are the EA of Zoo and Theme Park games to the point I’m not buying their games anymore even when they’re well made on a technical level and interesting to me. They’re just way too greedy.
I don’t get that amount of frustration. The zoo game from frontier that I bought years ago still get updated with new free content here and there. Sure there are DLC but you can perfectly play the initial game without any of them, or get them on a sale. Isn’t it ?
I fully understand someone thinking x game deserves to be there instead of y but I think this is a great list that spans most genres and serves as a wonderful stepping stone for exploration within gaming.
If I give this list to someone who doesn’t know yet, what kind of games they like, this list will show them great games from all major “eras” and all kinds of dev studio sizes/budgets. And once they have played, say, KotoR 2 (since it’s in the same list that recommends new and good games like Baldur’s Gate 3, they are more likely to check out other old but great games like Gothic 1 and 2 (and, of course, KotoR 1).
The thing for me wasn’t so much the game choice but the placement. It feels like they took a big bag of 100 of the best games and randomly picked them out one at a time. If you start to ask is Y really better than X on this list then it starts to make less and less sense.
That’s good. A game can’t hold an unlimited amount of NPC interactions, and just get repetitive. Ai isn’t taking your job if it’s not possible for you to give me endless dialogue.
Idk why you are downvoted. It’s sad, tragic even, but your comment is interesting and I wanna know how you think about generated content. Do you want infinite immersion?
Calling unions “legacy institutions” is a dangerous take that could get some of our kids or grandkids killed in coal mines.
I’ll admit my kids aren’t perfect, but they deserve better than to be victims of the current blatant strategic communications agenda to turn their kids into wage slaves at age 8, so that Elon Musk can build an even bigger penis shaped rocket.
I just feel that you can’t say a machine is replacing you, when it’s doing something you’re not capable of, which is to provide infinite, responsive responses and dialogue. I’m not saying these voice actors aren’t needed or should be screwed over. Why not dialogue a character, pay the actor, and ai can generate the infinite responses. Pay the actor a premium for this.
Ai I can also see being great for NPC and enemy reactions.
I remember playing Manhunt back in the day and being intrigued by the ability to use my mic to distract enemies, and some games that let you respond by mic, and I hoped that would go somewhere but it can’t, not without Ai.
Makes sense, that’s what I was referring to. What kind of interactions are you thinking that you would enjoy to have? As an example. (sorry if it seems strange to be asked, I’m a game designer and these things are very interesting to me :))
If I could take Skyrim as an example, I would love a VR game where I can walk up to an NPC and ask about the city I’m in, or where to find a place and have the NPCs say more than “good day sir” over and over. Of course I’m asking a bit much at this point, but I have seen some videos I hope are real where people test out ai NPCs
Yes, I have always thought about what it would feel with actual immersion, the kind that can only come from infinite content areas. An mmo role-playing server or similar games that have generative content. Now I think it will feel like it does with other content areas, such as if you don’t complete all levels of a game like candy crush, that it has a different taste than something with “technically” infinite content. If the type of player whose enjoyment is immersion based it has major potential once context issues for local models can be improved.
10 years? Bruh 10 months. I saw some stuff recently that was image gen, and there is not a fucking chance I would be able to say it was or wasn’t generated. Like I do some aspects of this shit for a living and I’m fucked.
Code generation, image and video generation, voxel generation, voice generation.
We’re fucked. This is like, seeing the iceberg in that minute before it hits on the titantic.
Their games are shit - Starfailed was garbage, Fallout 3 and 4 are running on the same engine designed for... Oblivion 20 years ago. They can't write jack shit, and the optimization is a joke.
I think their games are great. And I think the Creation Engine is great, the amount of immersion I get and amount of hours I spend playing fallout, oblivion, Skyrim, morrowind is second to none. The mod support is endless, they were in a league of their own when it came to RPGs
Granted they have slipped a little (okay alot) lately but that doesn’t take away from their past works.
You can think the creation engine is great, but there are simple issues that should have been fixed decades ago they’ve completely ignored. At this point it should be considered an insult to the player base that there needs to be the “unofficial patch” for all games. It would take more time and effort arguing against fixing them, than actually fixing them.
I was under the impression that 99.99% of fixes in the unofficial patches were gameplay related things, not underlying issues with the engine.
I also feel like if every game had the player count and mod support of Bethesda games, they would all have unofficial patches. No game is perfect and bug free, I know Bethesda games are buggier than most, but they are also way more ambitious and have way more content than most (I’m talking pre-starfield here, I haven’t gone back to starfield like I still go back to fallout and elder scrolls)
Gameplay related things on each game is an engine issue. The fixes have already been completed in unofficial patches. It would be pretty much a copy/paste fix in the engine. They have just opted not to.
A misplaced mesh, missing quest dialogue, or invalid NPC navmesh is not an engine issue and is specific to each individual game, these things can’t be fixed in the engine
It would be pretty much a copy/paste fix in the engine. They have just opted not to.
You either misunderstood the comment you’re replying to or don’t know how the unofficial patch works or both.
99% of what the Unnofficial patch fixes have absolutely nothing to do with the engine. For example, we’ll use the Skyrim Unnoficial Patch, easily the biggest and most popular. It fixes literally nothing in the engine, it fixes certain models not having textures wrapped correctly, it fixes certain meshes or textures having small errors like clipping, it adds a new flag for a town that didn’t have a flag in the original for some reason, the absolute closest it gets to an “engine fix” is fixes for different scripts that sometimes fire incorrectly.
Literally none of these are engine issues or fixes. Sure, they definitely should’ve fixed them before releasing the game, but it’s not like these are engine issues that have somehow persisted for 20 years. They’re very small bugs with models, textures, and scripts, which are all individual game issues, not engine issues.
It’s objectively not. It was great back when Oblivion came out
It objectively is for their use case. What do you want them to do? Switch to Unreal? Switch to Unity? Switch to any other pre-built engine? They can’t, none of those will work for their use case without major modification.
Want them to create an entirely new engine from scratch? I mean, they could do that, but that would involve throwing away 20 years of innovation and experience on this product and would delay any projects massively.
Want them to massively update their engine? They just did with Starfield’s Creation Engine 2.0, which fixed or improved 90% of their engine issues and is a massive overhaul of their original engine.
This is a company that recently sold for several billion dollars, they’ve undoubtedly had a team investigating what they could to do their engine for at least a decade, and they’ve decided that this path is the only realistic one for them.
But I’m sure you know better than the large team that does this for a living. /s
Yep. Unreal is more than capable doing everything they need
They just did with Starfield's Creation Engine 2.0, which fixed or improved 90% of their engine issues
It's the most unoptimized engine out there. It's performance is horrible. And Starfield couldn't even achieve loading screen free planet surface landing like No Man's Sky, or Star Citizen
Out of curiosity, which engine would you say is your favourite? If Bethesda were going to start using a new engine tomorrow, which engine would you hope they would use?
“I don’t personally like their games so I hope all of the hundreds of employees working on them lose their jobs and their families are devastated by life changing hardship”
I think you missed the exit for Reddit, it was back there a ways.
If you miss that old style of game, that’s fine, but there are probably tons of ways to morph the RTS genre that solves its old problems, finds it more success, and still scratches that itch. I’m quite fond of Cannon Brawl, and Tooth and Tail had its issues but was on the right track.
I wish I hadn’t installed the update. I was hoping it would make the game run better on the steam deck, but it’s actually worse. I think they’ve increased the graphical fidelity, but it’s come at the expense of the battery. I found a work around to get the game launcher to come up so I could lower the graphics settings to improve battery life, but that doesn’t fix the bugs. They seem to have gotten worse with the update. Never change, Bethesda. Never change.
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