Maybe raise a stink with your attorney general and/or representative, too. The whole idea that a company can sell licenses for something and then arbitrarily decide they don’t want to do it anymore and revoke all the licenses doesn’t sound legal. And if it is, it doesn’t sound like it should be.
Not in this case, seeing that progress is stored online.
Who says that the game you care about tomorrow won’t do this next? Why be against an action/not care about something that can only benefit players now and in the long term?
The Crew was great in its time. It was basically the bridge between Test Drive Unlimited (superior open world gameplay) and early Forza Horizon (superior driving physics). Later Forza Horizon games simply took all the good gameplay features from both TLU and The Crew and is unmatched in quality now.
The Crew 2 was worse than both its predecessor and the competing Forza Horizon at that time, so if you were talking about that I’d half agree. But it’s still a problematic industry trend worth stopping.
Never has it been easier for small people to attempt to knock people down to their level. It’s a shame people feel alright being so nasty to a complete stranger
NZXT Flex customers have never experienced a pre-tax subscription price increase and will never experience one unless they decide to switch subscription tiers.
I think they’re forgetting the part where GN themselves were a NZXT flex customer who experienced subscription price increases. So this statement is already proven to be false before they even said it.
Nintendo deserves a lot of shit for their business decisions, but not for their art directions. windwaker and sunshine still look good to this day by simply appling higher resolutions and some anti aliasing. No game with “realistic graphics” has ever stood the test of time.
You can’t use logic here, it’s a waste of time. They already made up their minds and even assigned a maliciously litigious multibillion dollar corporation to their internal identity.
I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.
On a pedestrian level, I’ve really liked the slow move from “SNES aesthetic” to “PS1/PS2 aesthetic”. My first console was an N64, so I guess I never had much nostalgia for the 8-bit days, and I feel like 3D gives a lot of opportunities for intelligent asset reuse to give a game lots of content.
Yes! For instance, say you’re making a character action game about big flashy jumping attacks. It took a long time to make the attack animations and now you need to provide the player with unlockables to encourage exploring, or some DLC.
If you have a 2D game, you’d need to do a LOT to integrate any new cosmetics, or characters, into your existing protagonist. But in 3D, if your character finds a hat, it’s very simple to just attach it to the model. Even swapping to a new playable character, you can retarget animations as long as proportions are similar.
I’m still not quite getting your point, sorry. Why would 3D make it easier to attach a hat to the character or retarget animations than 2D? That seems like a specific engine feature limitation and not inherently a shortcoming of 2D in general? It sounds like you’re comparing 3D to a primitive 2D engine where you need to manually draw and animate everything on screen instead of to a modern 2D engine with character bones, parenting, etc. Perhaps I’m actually out of the loop regarding the current limitations of 2D game engines and am thinking more in terms of a comparison between 3D and 2D animation software.
It might be simple attachment if a character is using skeletal animation, eg Intrusion 2. That art style isn’t used often because the direct limb tweeting is often overly visible. Often, most character frames are hand drawn or at least prerendered.
In these hand drawn styles, a character’s head could appear to enter Z depth as part of the drawing (imagine a 6 frame animation of a character spinning a sword like a top). When that happens WHILE they’re also wearing an attached hat, the hat must rotate and adjust for the depth as well - which means new drawings, even if you’re able to specify the positions of the character’s head during each frame of the animation.
We could be talking past each other with bad descriptions that need visuals, though.
I appreciate your more detailed description. I think I get what you’re trying to explain. It just seems to me (at a very shallow level, I’m no expert) that all else being equal, 2D should be able to do just about anything that 3D can, but more simply (with some exceptions, of course - trying to reproduce a 3D look and behavior in 2D would obviously be an order of magnitude more work than just doing it in 3D).
To your point, I’ve generally noticed that bone-driven 2D animations tend to look kind of janky, like marionettes, but I didn’t think that it was a technical limitation as much as just the animators taking a lot more shortcuts. In other words, why would limb tweening be inherently more overly visible in 2D vs. 3D? It seems that it would be hard to do a pure comparison that controlled for other variables, but intuitively it seems to me that in a comparison that did control for those 2D would turn out easier to produce content for than 3D.
Again, to your point, I can understand that if we compared popular hand-drawn or pixel art 2D assets and environments with popular styles of 3D assets and environments in common usage, especially across indie games, 3D could very likely come out ahead in productivity.
Sorry if I have dragged this conversation out too long. I have an interest in game design/development and game art and hope to some day get into both myself with some small games, so this is a topic that I would very much like to have a solid understanding of so I can make the most efficient use of my time.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
With 3d you make the model and it’s “naturally” 3d (obviously). If you want to make a 2d sprite have a different perspective, you need to animate (often times draw) it specifically. As they mentioned it before, it’s mostly useful for animations and movement. It may not even be “reusability” as much as “lack of need to think about perspective” or “scalability”.
Oh, absolutely. I was thinking more in terms of 2D doing traditional flat 2D views like side-view platformers or top-down views. I can completely understand that as soon as you try to emulate 3D with even something as simple as an isometric view it’s going to be much more work than just doing straight 3D.
Another point is that with a 3d engine under low-storage concerns (like say, the N64) you can do a lot of fuckery like having a total of ~10 textures and just apply various color tints (and maybe a blur here and there) to make it seem like there’s more. While 2d engines do support this nowadays, it’s still hard for artists to “fake” such a wide gamut of sprites, just by the nature of the medium. There’s no model to apply a texture to, so you’re limited to having a base sprite and recoloring it.
I can understand this too.
You could do a modular approach in 2d. For example, a character is built of the body (arms+face), hair, pants, shirt and shoes and change them individually. Same for houses with roofs, doors, windows and walls, etc.
I imagine that a lot of 2D games use these kinds of techniques.
However, as already said, you’re limited by perspective a lot. Each new perspective requires almost double the sprites.
I see the points that you made to another commenter but SNES and Sega Genesis were 16-bit consoles. They were a dramatic improvement (and many games on them were the pinnacle as far as I’m concerned) over the 8-bit NES and Sega Master System. I’ll take well-designed 16-bit games over pretty much anything else.
Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.
AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.
So it sounds like you’re talking about knockoffs and not indies in general. Trying to make them equivalent ignores that the majority of game design innovation has come from indie games for many years.
Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.
It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.
The same Hasbro that tried to make a land grab for all D&D derivative content by changing their Open Game License to grant them irrevocable, perpetual rights to it. This is not a nice company as they demonstrate time and again.
So maybe it’s time the RPG community stopped thinking Hasbro are ever going to change, mourn for what D&D has become, but move onto something else.
Yeah Pathfinder 2e is good. It’s more crunchy than 5e, but that also means there are rules for most situations that come up. I like the 3 action system, much better than the old, “main action, swift action, move action, move- equivalent action” thing the old version had going on.
I have a group of friends, half in same town as me, half on the other side of the country, that get together once a week ion discord and play dnd via a self hosted foundry virtual tabletop docker. We used to play 5e but we decided to try out pathfinder 2e to see if we liked it and we haven’t gone back, pathfinder is fantastic. The flexibility with the actions makes it feel like you always get a chance to do something and you aren’t just wasting your turn when you are getting into position or whatever. Feels close enough to 5e that most of your intuition will be pretty close, just use a different website to look shit up. Highly recommend pathfinder!
What? We don’t have a plethora of other games here in the US? I’ll have to remind the owners of all those shops that those hundreds of other games they’re selling currently only exist outside of the US. How embarrassing for us…
The OGL License happened after Larian teamed up with Hasbro to make Baldur’s Gate 3. Thankfully Larian is still independent so it can continue on to make better RPGs without Hasbro.
Most of the planets are dull on purpose because my graphics card catches fire if there’s too much excitement on screen. Thanks for looking out for me, Todd!
This is absurd, considering Mike Johnson doesn’t work for a living. None of these government officials do anything worthwhile but still get paid for it.
Pays well too. The price of their morality for a lifetime of pay and free healthcare. Because let’s face it, these idiots get FEHB healthcare for life for being in congress because they made it so. They get a salary AFTER they served too, after Min 5 years, but they get 80% of their salary as part of a pension. Insane nonsense if you stay for 20 years compared to what we get.
So there is an anti-trust lawsuit against steam, but not apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft… Etc of those giant companies who literally destroy everything in their way? Please tell me they’re next?
There are anti trust lawsuits going on with most the companies you listed though? Microsoft had one in the early tech days that they won, but there’s probably going to be another one soon…
GN sticks to tech news, and I respect that that Steve sticks to his area of expertise when it comes to reporting on issues in the tech field. LTT has repeatedly shown glaring errors in their testing, and that’s what was reported on by GN.
The staff and professional issues the company faces are for an entirely different style of journalism, and I do hope someone picks up that story.
Linus has always struck me as someone who would be kinda cool to be friends with, but the worst person to be your boss. He can be arrogant, dismissive of employee ideas, and penny pinching. I’ve seen it time and time again in videos where he participates, and it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. I only hope the people who faced discrimination and burnout at LTT are in better places now and have found ways to let their obvious expertise shine.
I also hope one of these employees can summon the strength to report LMG to the relevant Canadian authorities for their blatant abuse of their employees. No matter the “opportunities” and employer offers, or the “contracts” they make employees sign, workers have rights, and their should be a reckoning when those rights are violated.
Yeah, Canada is not the country to fuck with people’s rights in. Many still do, of course, but if they actually fight back companies will usually be willing to give 5 figures once their lawyers get word of what’s happening, in hopes of avoiding the 6 or 7 figure judgement that the courts might give them.
Btw, if you want to learn about your rights, take a course meant to train HR people. It’s their job to protect the company and they need to know where the lines are to do so effectively.
Don’t wanna say I was expecting it but I was always kinda waiting for “something” to come out of ltt. A bunch of tech bros in their 30s still making penis and 69 jokes every video doesn’t seem like a good environment lmao
Yeah enough of their company culture had leaked into their videos and through some of the things Linus had said that I wasn’t really that surprised to see that thread. The power imbalance was thrown around for jokes and Linus comes off as a stingy bastard who will spend a ton of money in some places and then complain about a relatively trivial expense elsewhere. And the way he talks about it implies that he thinks everyone sees it that way.
There’s a web tool that estimates the value of your Steam account by looking at all the games you own, but it can’t tell you how precisely much you’ve actually spent on Valve’s wallet-plundering platform, microtransactions and all.
If you bought on sales or Humble Bundles then this number will be so far off its useless. If you only buy new and retail then I feel bad for you sucker.
After many years of selectively evaluating and purchasing bundles as my main source of new games, I've come to wonder if it would've been better to just buy the individual games when I wanted to play them at whatever the available price was - the rate at which I get through games is far lower than the rate at which games are available in "good" bundles. In the end I'm not even sure if I've saved money (because of how many games have been bought but are as-of-yet unplayed) and it does take more time to evaluate whether something's a good deal or not.
The upside is way more potential variety of games to pull from in my library, but if I only play at most like 1-2 dozen new games a year then I'm not sure that counts for much 🫠
A bit tangential, but I also feel a lot of people make the same mistake with GamePass. I buy a lot of gameson release day (mostly indies, but also some AAA), so theoretically I should be the target audience for GamePass, but I did the math once for a three-month period and came out at a loss if I had bought GamePass.
Based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, the type of person to get GamePass also typically enjoys a lesser variety of games on average, making the cost/benefit ratio even worse.
I guess I’m a weird one. I’ve saved so much money using Game Pass it’s not even funny. Throw in the pc version, and I’ve saved even more. I can try so many different genres I wouldn’t typically risk my money for. I have also avoided buying games I thought I would love but then ended up hating.
Yeah, I don’t think I make that many that wrong purchases, although that doesn’t mean that a lot of games I enjoy end up unfinished due to limited time. When it comes to testing games, one thing that’s neat is that demos got a huge revival in the last few years, particularly due to Steam Next Fest.
Looking at the current line-up, I’ll say that right I’d probably come to a different conclusion, seeing as Blue Prince, South of Midnight and the new DOOM are all included. Then again, I use Linux, so I wouldn’t be able to use Game Pass even if I wanted to.
I let the charity be the deciding factor. Some times I will just get a bundle and move the sliders all the way over for EFF because I would have donated to them anyways. Other times I see that the cause (relief, children, etc) is just worth doing. If I don’t play the games, at least the money was not wasted.
Wanna try some super entertaining pills, or would you prefer a syringe so you can pump entertainment straight into your veins? First round is free, don’t you want to be entertained?
Somewhere in here there’s a joke about the cocaine laced with fentanyl that I keep getting told is a massive problem that requires more police funding to deal with.
The feds can’t imprison me for making cocaine “too entertaining”!
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