BG3 is critically acclaimed and on path to win every GOTY award this year. Taking this into consideration any game compared against BG3 may look lackluster, not just Starfield.
I didn’t play these games yet but I did play The Outer Worlds and it was acceptable to me. If Starfield is a game along the same lines then I am OK with that.
Hogwarts Legacy was a very solid title with very memorable characters, story and wow what a detailed fun world. Have not played BG3 yet so cannot compare, but Hogwarts is my GOTY so far.
Just finished Hogwarts yesterday for the first time. I absolutely love the world building, but I found the story a bit lacking. In my mind I ended up siding with Ranrok, in his quest to free the goblins, Sebastian (Solomon was an asshole thorough and through), and the ending was pretty vanilla. Also the whole idea in the ending of keeping the ancient power secret makes no sense: the same implications could be made100% for normal magic
TLDR: There was a scene in a prerelease version of the game that depicted a young girl riding on the shoulders of a nude adult woman. Valve interpreted it as sexual, devs say it wasn’t, that the young girl model was a placeholder, and removed the scene entirely from the release build, which still can’t be published on Steam due to their ban policy.
There’s already been extensive discussion about this already; the whole thing stinks of the dev trying to get extra publicity because the fucked around and found out.
Not merely as sexual, but as “sexual conduct”. Valve already hosts a huge number of games depicting full nudity and sex, and before the payment processors complained, that included games with r*pe in their description.
It’s a game where people are put in animal masks, chained up, and ridden around naked.
what the studio calls “grotesque, subversive imagery” of a ranch where nude human beings in horse masks are treated as animal livestock.
To pretend that said “grotesque, subversive imagery” is not in this case functioning on it’s proximity to sexual degradation, is disingenuous imo. I don’t blame Valve for not wanting to wade into an “art vs shock-sploitation” debate.
I don’t understand how this scene, which is only sexual by implication, is not allowed, but Fear and Hunger, in which you can drag a little girl through a dungeon full of monsters that sexually assault you, through orgy scenes, etc., is fine. Like I’m not saying that F&H should be removed, but I am saying that based on what is currently on Steam, it does not seem like this would be over the line.
Assuming you’re referring to F&H 1, that came out five years before Steam reviewed this game. It’s possible they simply became more strict over time and never revisited F&H because it never came up.
Also, Steam’s rules (or any other private platform’s rules) are not law. Precedent doesn’t really matter. They can decide arbitrarily when rules apply and don’t apply (so long as they don’t violate anti-competition laws and so on). One would hope they are consistent, but being an organization with likely multiple reviewers, it’s unlikely they are always in sync, especially with decisions separated by years.
A different question to ask is whether the scene you described would have passed review in 2023. I haven’t played F&H, but based on your description, it seems unlikely.
Anytime I’ve ever complained about lootboxes/gacha/gambling mechanics, I’ve not been excluding valve. That said, there is a contingent of people that likes to chime in to conversations about steam to say people shouldn’t use steam because valve does lootboxes, and I don’t think it’s terribly relevant in those conversations.
It's sad that a lot of devs just make their game and then slap frame-gen on it and then release it. Like who cares about optimization. Not that I blame them, people still buy those games full-priced, so...
Even so, the steam hardware survey seems to indicate that the vast majority of users wouldn’t reach specs to enable developer-approved framegen anyway. (Unless you count Lossless Scaling).
We’re kind of going full circle back to the paradigm of “You are judged on your entry level as much (or more) than your high end [gameplay performance]”.
Pokemon Red got me through a year of boring ass 9th grade early morning study hall on my Gameboy Pocket.
With that being said, it’s hilarious to me that someone else took the “pocket monster” formula and built it into something bigger and better than Game Freak or Nintendo could ever develop.
Nintendo is clearly upset about Palworld, but fuck 'em. They had over two and a half decades to improve the formula and now the best thing they can do is half-assed, low effort cash grabs; Gameplay with the depth of a teaspoon and the visuals of a smeared turd.
i wonder tho, why are they going after palworld specifically? cause palworld is faaaar from being the first pokemon-inspired game, and id argue it’s not even the best one
and it can’t just be the plagiarized design allegations (which, tbf, some pals are really on the limit, not that it’s a bad thing), because if it was they’d just use their existing copyright instead of filing tons of new patents
Pokemon is the biggest media franchise on planet earth. To call that dumbass palworld AI SLOP “bigger and better than GF or Nintendo could ever develop” is MAGA-level batshit insane. Nintendo is ROLLING in money rn, they don’t need to try harder for shit. They’re doing phenomenally.
The bitching about Nintendo is wild, like yalls don’t quit. Give eternal passes to Sony and Microsoft, but the pikachu/Mario guys are the villains…??? Give me a fucking break.
More profitable is not the same thing as better. For example, Marvel movies are pretty shit, but they make a ton of money. Palworld is better than Pokémon, for many reasons. One major one is that it actually tried to innovate on something. That’s more than Game Freak has done in decades despite having an infinite money glitch.
The fact that there are still hardcore pokemon fans out there who buy every one of their games like it’s a masterpiece is crazy. They aren’t even just bad, you have to put effort into making them look that shit, and the gameplay is basically still the same as i played on the original Gameboy when i was 12
I haven’t played them in ages, but from what I’ve seen of them they’re worse than we had back then. At least they tried to present some challenge. I think that’s mostly gone now, like it is for most mainstream gaming.
Devil’s Advocate: This is for the adult gamer set who only have a prescribed amount of time they can spend on gaming. They get a chance for a few hours every few weeks. Their lives are overwhelming with details and information they need to remember regarding every day life. They simply don’t have the mental capacity to remember all the details from a game they spend two to three hours on once every few weeks, not when their mental focus is given to you know, real fucking life.
While I understand the frustration with such writing, because it bothers me as well… I don’t have a job where I work 60 hours a week nor do I have children. I’m kind of the exception to the rule when it comes to being able to give a game my full attention. Further, I have always had an incredibly good memory and attention to detail. Most people I have met in my life simply… do not have incredibly good memories or attention to detail. That doesn’t make them bad people who are living life wrong, it just means their brains work differently or they’re putting that mental energy to different things.
If we want people to pay attention to these stories, well, we’ve got to change fucking society from the ground up so they have the free time to actually be able to do so. Whinging about it like this isn’t going to magically make people pay better attention when they have to split their time with taking care of their children, which obviously should take priority over a fucking video game.
People act like the Netflixication is because people are all busy staring at their phones… I posit that it’s actually people cooking meals, doing dishes, doing laundry, ironing clothes, and a thousand other tedious daily activities where they’re trying to squeeze in some entertainment while also paying attention to something else entirely.
Games with complicated or involved stories just need to go back to having a comprehensive log or journal. That used to be a staple of big games, to the point where it could take you days to read all the lore and journal entires. That might not be fully ideal for those adult gamers either but theres definitely a comfortable middle ground where your active missions page has a little brief for each objective telling you who gave the quest, what they wanted and why. Lots of games these days can have like 20 active quest markers and give you no information about any of them beyond some random npc you talked to once wants 10 of something for some reason.
I remember back in the day, when a lot of the time you had to keep your log/journal yourself with pen and paper. Getting back to Lands of Lore after a week without any notes? Might as well start over.
I like the way the new wave of CRPGs — Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, etc. — deals with this problem. Of course you have a journal with a quest log and a lore encyclopedia. In addition to that, if you hover over highlighted words (names, lore things) during dialogue, it shows you a short explanation.
That’s a good point and, for lack of studies about it, it’s impossible to tell which is the most pervasive.
As a counterpoint, and this might be an "unpopular opinion"™: not all games are (should be) made for as broad an audience as possible and different attention (investment) levels should be expected depending on the game. That obviously won’t resonate with the business side of the gaming industry, but I think everyone needs to be aware of how much time they can dedicate to their hobbies and pick them accordingly.
I’m thankfully not in a position where I have to work 60hrs a week and I’m childless as well, but some weeks might leave me with less free time than others and I pick entertainment/media accordingly. That might not be what others do and I know my experience is likely purely anecdotal, but if I feel I don’t have enough time to properly enjoy a game or remember its premises as I play, I’ll simply do something else, even if gaming is my favourite hobby.
And to be clear, I fully agree that society needs to change dramatically either way. Everyone would benefit from better work-life balance.
not all games are (should be) made for as broad an audience as possible
The problem is that when a AAA game costs three hundred million dollars to make due to all the performance capture and famous actors and high fidelity graphics and whatnot, you have to reach as broad an audience as possible in order to make that money back.
I think this is what's killing the blockbuster movies, too. Everything needs to be lowest-common-denomenator to have a hope of turning a profit.
Sure, and that makes financial sense, but that’s only one specific subset of games.
Smaller productions/games still have ways to turn a profit with smaller intended audiences and can in turn offer more complex storylines.
It’s also very important to remember that AAA doesn’t refer to quality; it’s terminology borrowed from financial products to indicate how safe an investment it is to generate a return.
What’s even the point of playing story games then if the story is condensed and simplified to such a degree? If all explanations are spoon fed to you and the story if so primitive that the bar is on the floor it just becomes boring. At this point you are better off playing games that focus on gameplay instead, it will be a more fun experience.
It’s like reading a summary of a book of just watch a short clip about it on TikTok because books are “too long” and then calling yourself a reader.
I’m not sure where the Trails games fall when it comes to being dialogue or story heavy, but it has taken me a good 380 hours to get to the 7th game in the series (Trails of Cold Steel 2) playing over the last 3 years and it has been fantastic.
I’m in my early 40s and have a kindergartener so gaming is fairly limited. These games have become my “nightly TV” where I play about an hour before I go to bed.
This is not a good argument for unnecessary exposition though, this is just an argument for shorter, bite-sized narratives, or even what some games already do (like The Witcher 3) where they recap where you are in the loading screen. If anything, unnecessary exposition just wastes what little time you have to play, or forces you to skip the dialogue entirely.
I don’t accept the premise that working a job to make someone else rich is axiomatically good.
Many jobs make the world worse. I’d rather someone sit at home and play Tetris than build murder-drones, or work on some sort of AI powered stalking-ad company.
Many of the jobs are just bullshit. Another “AI” company? Another product manager with no real decision making power? A few billion dollars poured into “the metaverse”? Waste of time and resources.
That aside, most jobs make the owners rich while labor gets a few crumbs. You work all day making widgets. The boss pays you $10. They sell your widgets for $1000. That’s a bum deal. But there’s a thousand desperate people waiting to take your spot, plus union busters eager to betray labor and beat you up. Pay people the real value of their labor, and treat them with respect, and you’d likely get more people working.
Johnson is a heretical, hypocritical, piece of shit. No one should take him seriously. His church should – wait, he’s southern baptist? The “we’re going to split off because we want slavery” sect? Not surprising. Those assholes suck.
tl;dr he sandbagged the movement when it was beginning to build momentum with a bunch of, what would charitably be called, misunderstandings of the whole point.
Set in 1997 in the wake of World War 3, the world has become afflicted by a strange new growth called Tempest, a russet, flowery structure that looks like a plant but isn’t. Tempest is hazardous to human health and spreads rapaciously, but it’s also an abundant energy resource. This makes it the primary catalyst of a war between Earth’s two dominant factions, the Global Defence Force (GDF) and the Tempest Dynasty.
You weren’t kidding, lol.
Good anyway, someone has to make good C&C games, and sure as hell it ain’t gonna be EA.
BadLuckMax also snagged several pieces of ill-gotten Mythic gear, including the unfortunately named Rushed Beta Launchers boots which, being leather (and thus useless on a Paladin) feels like a brutal jab at Blizzard.
Is this a retail thing where Paladins can only wear plate or is the author not familiar with the mechanic? Plenty of paladins taking cloth/leather/mail in OG and Classic.
I was actually surprised to see Ultima Online is still up and active recently. It must have a pretty decent sized population for EA not to shut down and repurpose the servers for Battlefield or something.
It is advanced access, however Firaxis did an announcement shortly after release, addressing the rocky release and promising to fix things, where they (accidentally) called it early access. It seems they changed that now, still, it was there (and was made fun of) in forums and other Lemmy like communities.
I just checked and nearly choked. I’ve played every single Civ game ever made. As much as I love the series, there’s no way in hell I’m paying AU$160 for a base game.
It does include the first two expansions that will come out and leader packs and shit. I have sunk far more hours into civ than any other game. I very rarely buy a game, maybe twice a year. So it was worth it to me. I’ll play it for 500+ hours and at that point it’s 30 cents an hour of entertainment.
pcgamer.com
Ważne