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utopiah, do games w Former BioWare lead writer reads the runes on EA-Saudi deal and speculates that 'guns and football' are in, 'gay stuff' is out, and the venerable RPG studio may be for the chop

“read the runes” … people need to stopping believing that money is money. Money is money AND strings attached. It’s totally different to get 1 EUR from a friend vs 1 EUR from a brank vs 1 EUR from VC vs 1 EUR of public subsidies. Money NEVER comes without string so one must be cautious they are not getting a noose around their neck while signing a contract.

PS: IMHO NLNet is an example of “good” money. Other examples welcomed. In software in the game “industry” specifically I don’t know where one can find non “bad” money so please if you have examples, do share.

yakko,

Bad money chases out good, they say.

utopiah,

Fascinating, digging into en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law then, thanks for bringing that up!

yakko,

I thought I might be playing it loose applying it to the case of private equity in the creative arts, but it feels right

Lushed_Lungfish, do games w EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm

Ah, I’m so relieved. For a second I thought they were going to stop being absolute dog shit.

mhague, do games w EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm

Before they bought EA: EA is literally the devil.

After they bought EA: Great, there goes our EA!

inclementimmigrant,

More like: Damn, there’s another level of hell?

EncryptKeeper,

Well there was just some base level of hope in the back of some people’s minds that one day they might get their shit together and now that hope is entirely gone.

Duamerthrax,

Corporate wants you to find the difference between these two pictures.

Kolanaki, do games w Would-be City of Heroes successor, Ship of Heroes, decides to launch the MMO with a $45 price tag and a $15 monthly subscription and it's, er, going about as well as you'd expect
@Kolanaki@pawb.social avatar

MMO with a subscription?

Bitch, you ain’t WoW. And I won’t even pay a subscription for WoW.

markz, do games w Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics'

Shiny.

vane, do games w EU tax officials confront the most pressing legal question of our time: If you sell RuneScape gold to someone and they use it to buy a magic sword, do you still have to pay taxes?

Food safety organs need to inspect all those Stardew Valley farms.

Soapbox, do games w 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'

I haven’t played more than about 30 minutes of a Borderlands game. But from clips I have seen of all of them over the years, they all look exactly the same. Sounds to me like it’s just a poorly optimized game, as is standard for new AAA slop releases.

User79185, do games w 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'

You need to have $500 gpu to hit 60fps with 1080p native, this is hilariously bad.

SailorFuzz,
@SailorFuzz@lemmy.world avatar

I haven’t seen a $500 gpu in near a decade. Even used. If you see a $500 gpu today, I guarantee you it can’t run Borderlands 4.

orca, do gaming w I fixed Borderlands 4's stuttering issue by upping my shader cache size to 100 GB, which feels like something I shouldn't have to do in a well-optimised game

So what I’m hearing is that it’s not even worth trying to play on a Steam Deck 😂

morbidcactus, (edited )

I did it for the hell of it, I think it had 60-80 fpm after the opening cutscene, literal slideshow experience.

There’s people on proton db claiming higher frames, but like 18-22 fps, def far from playable

AdolfSchmitler, do games w 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'

How tf do companies get to say this shit and still be in business?? Are there that many people who just blindly bend over and take it?? Don’t people have standards anymore?

Flamekebab,
@Flamekebab@piefed.social avatar

Most of their customers don't listen to them. Not hear and disregard, never listen in the first place. Have no interest in game industry gossip.

psx_crab,

Yes. It’s in the top selling list in Steam and have 300k concurrent player top. People give him power to say that.

chunes, do games w 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed'

I’m so sick of bad performance from all the big engines these days. Even unity makes simple 2d games chug.

Quetzalcutlass,

That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.

Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.

Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.

Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.

M1ch431,
@M1ch431@slrpnk.net avatar

That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines.

Some studios are able to use these major engines very well, others not so much. It seems like there is a level of expertise needed to make well-oiled games.

brucethemoose, (edited )

On the contrary, custom engines have been bombing.

Look at Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 or basically any custom engine AAA. Look at what happened to things like ME Andromeda.

…Then look at KCD2. It looks freaking fantastic, looks like raytacing with no raytracing, runs like butter, and it’s Crytek.

Look at something like Satisfactory, rendering tons of stuff on a shoestring budged and still looking fantastic thanks to Unreal Lumen.


There’s a reason the next Cyberpunk is going to be Unreal, and its because building a custom engine just for your game is too big an undertaking. Best to put that same budget in optimizing a ‘communal’ engine, polish, bugfixing and such.

Borderlands 4 is slow because the botched optimization, not because its Unreal.

KingThrillgore, do games w In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

It helps that Borderlands runs like shit

chameleon, do games w In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller
@chameleon@fedia.io avatar

I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.

Minnels,

I have no clue why it says MOBA gameplay because it is nothing like a MOBA unless there are multiple definitions on that term. The only thing is that you have 4 (5) skills?

Played the demo for like 8 hours which was enough for getting all my 5 chars to level 10 or more which feel enough to put on whatever in the skilltree.

Agree with the slow progress however but I don’t mind too much. I have a lot of fun with the game.

Ileftreddit, do games w Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'

Bro running the greatest grift on earth not counting the crypto market

kureta, do games w Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'

I was this 🤏 close to buying squadron 42 years ago, as it was just about to get released. dodged that bullet.

psx_crab,

42 years ago

I heard it’s been in development for a long time but didn’t know it’s this long.

pyre,

this is why you should buy games that are released

p03locke,
@p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Right. Never pre-order games. Ever.

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