Don’t assume it is “checking out” from society or taking the easy way out. The news will find you, don’t worry. Plus maintaining focus on your thing is something that can take significant effort.
I have noticed that the smaller I make my world, the happier I am. My free time goes into my family, friends, hobbies, and pets (which I guess is a big subset of the hobbies). I think a big part of the benefit is not just focusing on the people who can have the biggest effect on my life, but focusing on the people whose life I can improve the most with my involvement.
Our brains evolved to keep tabs on our clan or our village, not to monitor the events of the entire Earth in near real time, as if we’re going to do anything with that information. In fact, I think that “need” to be informed is often just an addiction manufactured by the need to drive engagement to validate 24/7 news as a business model.
I was about to rebut the “visit the US” thing, but people really should wait until immigration no longer looks at peoples’ phones or social media. I think I can still refuse as a citizen on 4th amendment grounds, but until that’s extended to visitors, I recommend holding off.
The big problem with matchmaking is that in the long run, it kills game. When people start to move on to a new thing, the population that stays because they're attached to the game gets fucked over by matchmaking.
The less people they are, the worse it works. That's when a server browser and the ability to run community server becomes crucial. It will keep a game alive for a decade after its last update.
Matchmaking puts people into a limited number of servers. Yeah, you get the problem of realizing that those folk have been playing Tribes 2 for over twenty years at this point but you also have people to play with on that one 24 player server. Versus twelve servers with 2 players and a bunch of bots (if the game has them) each.
I always would rather both options. But from a game health standpoint… hoppers tend to have clear advantages at most player counts.
I think the general idea is that if I want to spin up a server for my friend group that’s been gaming together for 20 years, we can buy the game and do just that. That’s opposed to the money I spent on the game being useless when they decide they want to stop paying for servers.
That’s perfectly acceptable justification to shut down gameservers and profit from people moving to the next version of the game. Gone are the days of private servers, especially with client and serverside mods, that kept people engaged with an older game for years. That’s not profitable.
Still, DICE insists the Portal browser will satisfy. It does have some qualities that simulate a classic server experience, like how you can earn full XP in Portal matches as long as the house rules closely resemble the vanilla ones.
The community “servers” aren’t persistent though. They’ll only stay online as long as someone is online and using that instance. If that last person leaves the server shuts down - as far as we know, it still seems a like murky, but without being able to rent servers I can’t imagine them just leaving all of them online for free
So in 2042, if you had the premium battle pass, you could set up one persistent server. It was hosted by them but didn’t disappear without players. I don’t know how it will work for bf6.
I think the most important feature is that we have persistent lobbies that don’t disband after a game like matchmaking. That they “stay online” while nobody uses it is really not the important part imo.
supposedly doesn’t work on windows either if you play valorant ar maybe other games with similar anticheats competing for the same system area no video game shoud have control over
ah so that post I saw the other day saying “begun the kernel wars have” makes senses. someone posted the fact they couldn’t play BF6 cause Valorant was installed.
I don’t even wanna know how much money they made or make with shark cards. Because of the dumbasses who buy that, they know exactly what people are willing to spend.
Huh. I guess that’s a matter of perspective? I wasn’t interested in the name, and even after reading the article I don’t recall what the name was. I just found the story interesting.
I don’t really think it’s a matter of perspective. These sites all omit the title of whatever thing it is they’re talking about so you have to click through to find out. They do it because research has shown it works to increase clicks. That is well within the definition of clickbait.
I mean, whether it works as clickbait depends on your perspective. I don’t disagree it may be intended that way, it just didn’t hit that way for me in particular.
Yeah, the silver lining of the whole gaming industry fallout is that the indie game scene has never been better. I was lamenting the fact that we hadn’t had a good top-down zeldalike in a long time, echoes of wisdom notwithstanding even though the formula is pretty altered. Someone pointed me in the direction of Master Key and it was an incredibly satisfying time. Almost like it would have fit in perfectly between LoZ 1 and Link’s Awakening.
You can’t build a game studio without funding, and that is where the problem lies…
Publishers have become very risk-averse ever since Embracer went downhill. They basically only invest in <literally the same game as some previously successful title>…
It isn’t that easy to go indie though, unless you do gamedev as a hobby and have another source of income.
I am working at what was a small studio (about 10 persons) when I joined, and has meanwhile grown to more than 50 employees.
I am a coder, and therefore don’t have direct insight into our finances, so please take everything below with a grain of salt. It is also intentionally vague because I don’t want to violate any NDAs.
Over the years we have started two indie projects, that both were completed and released, but both in the end had a publisher funding a part of the development. So, while they were indie initially, the released products cannot be called indie any more… The reason why we went for publisher contracts for those two projects were manyfold, but an important part was simply that we needed a way to cover our running costs. We are doing gamedev as a day-job, after all, so it needs to pay for our rent, food, etc… (Other important reason for going with a publisher were marketing, customer support,… All the things that we as developers have no experience in.)
Now that we have grown to medium studio size, we are hoping that we can at some point fund an indie project by making enough profit with other, publisher-funded projects. We have several projects running in parallel anyhow, and if 3 of them would yield enough money to pay a 4th project that would be fully our own, we would definitely go for it.
However, the market situation is tough, and we currently cannot afford to do that. Almost all profit we make goes into developing prototypes that we need in order to have a realistic chance to get the next publisher-funded project…
Two years ago it was a lot easier to get publisher contracts. Back then we were quite optimistic about being able to fund a fully independent project, but then the market changed, getting new publisher-funded projects has become a lot more difficult, and right now doing an indie project is (for us) not financially possible…
So, what we are doing now is that we are taking our game ideas and presenting them to publishers. The prottypes I mentioned? Most of them are for our own ideas. Having something the people at the publisher can play goes a long way in convincing them that a game-idea is fun. That’s not indie, but it is as close as we can get to making the games we want to make. While the last year has been tough, with publishers being very, very, very cautious about new ideas, the situation seems to slowly change, and we might eventually get funding for one of our own ideas. Maybe. If we are lucky.
There are also going to be lots of talent who permanently leave the industry because there are no longer any stable decent paying jobs at larger studios.
Meh. They might have not wanted to make Ep3, but the fans sure did.
I understand Valve works or used to work very differently, people collaborating without a strong top-down steering from management. Yet whatever explanation they have, we were punched in the gut at the end of Ep2, then left waiting, holding our breath. It’s just a piece of media, but it was an important part of my teenage years, and I could never experience the end of the story (outside of reading it in a blog) I waited so much for.
This made me really resent Valve, and soured my experience/memories with the series, I haven’t touched HL or other Valve game for 10+ years, and I don’t think I will in the future.
Half-Life 2 doesn’t even have a good combat loop. Half-Life 1 has more variety in the weapons and the map team in HL1 actually talked to the AI team. Notice how the combine just stand in doorways or out in the open? It’s lost, but I once saw a video showing that the combine can flank the player and do other complex maneuvers if the maps are properly designed, but Gabe was too obsessed with the Gravity Gun and everything else suffered. The “puzzles” are all either busy work or another seesaw task. I remember being hyped when Gabe said that Ep2 would have the biggest physics puzzle in it, but it ended up just being a huge seesaw “puzzle” that was solved just by clearing the cars off of it.
Every time I do a Half Life replay, I always end up getting bored in HL2 and skip to the community made stuff. Half-life Echoes and Entropy: Zero are musts.
There are so many landmark games. I’d say HL1 was more influential then HL2 anyway. Hell, I’d say Portal did more for first person puzzle games then HL2 did for FPS games.
It just handicapped itself by making the gravity gun such busy work and ignoring other aspects.
HL2 is more than just the gravity gun. The art style, the open levels on the beaches, the facial animations, the improved storytelling from HL1, the antlion army, game was so much more than just an updated half life. Without HL2, portal wouldn’t have any legs to stand on, valve took on narbacular drop, hired the team and put them to work on the source engine to make portal. Counter strike source was the defacto mp shooter for years if not decades, hell even the portal 2 goo came from half life 2 ep 3 just like they mention in the documentary. Saying they ignored all other aspects of the game for the gravity gun does half life 2 a disservice to what it accomplished.
Hey, here’s this cool thing. You can summon Antlions to fight with you, but only in two areas and never again. Oh, that boss fight in Ep2 where you could have gotten it again? Nope, but here’s a Defend Against Waves set piece instead.
What I’m saying is that the combat loop got ignored for the gravity gun. Where’s the Gluon Gun? Why is the Tau Cannon only mounted to the buggy? Why are both the SMG and AR2 full auto, spread weapons? If we’re doing wide open areas, the AR2 should really have a tighter spread for long range engagements.
Halo did wide open environments, did vehicles with mouse or analog stick steering was a joy to drive and actually used them in more then one area before HL2. Keyboard steering sucks.
What HL2 excels at is presentation of the story. It’s really not that deep of a story.
Also, never liked CS or military shooters, so that’s not exactly a going to sell me. And don’t get me started on the hat shit.
The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.
Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun
Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.
HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.
HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, while polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.
Plus, unless the installers have the full package, it’ll still require an internet connection. Usually installers download the files and then install them.
What’s the difference? In practical terms, what does this mean for me as the consumer? We don’t own the intellectual property, but may use the software as-is? From a practical, consumer standpoint that feels the same as the days of owning your software on a disc, unable to be taken as long as you have physical control over the device. I’m fine with calling this “owning” personally.
I’m absolutely willing to be wrong on this. I’m by no means an expert. Please, if I have missed something, let me know.
There really is no difference. For almost all intents and purposes, GOG’s offline installers can be treated the same way as physical CDs of way back then, with one of the only exceptions being that you cannot resell them.
Depending on your perspective, the sell/trade/loan aspect of physical can be a huge deal. I outlined in another comment, selling/trading games was never my thing, but it was my cousins. From my perspective, there’s marginal difference, but there IS a difference.
I don’t want to advocate for shoveling money into any company, but if you could sell your steam games it would screw over indie devs in a big way. Many games made by small studies or one person don’t have as much content as AAA studies and would be far more prone to a small handful of copies being distributed back and forth on the used market instead of each being a sale that goes to the developer.
Some devs would see a drop in sales as much as 90% and I just don’t think it’s worth it to shoot the gaming industry in the foot like that.
Just to be clear: my main point was that you don’t own any more the game bought on GOG than on Steam.
And there are definitely upsides to this type of market.
Although nowadays I wouldn’t buy a just released triple A 70€ game knowing I can’t sell or give it (not that I play those much anymore). The games I actually want to keep a few and far between.
I buy second hand Switch games for my nephews. It’s cheap, I’m actually giving them something, and they can trade them with their friends or sell them to buy fortnite skins the little shits
Again, not hating on GOG, I’ve been a customer for a long time. Mainly because I don’t want any kind of launcher. I play 99% solo games, don’t need no updates or multiple clicks to launch a game.
I would ABSOLUTELY argue that you more own a game purchased on gog, with an offline installer, than one purchased on steam. I now see the functional difference between owning a drm-free installer vs owning a physical game, but there’s also a gulf of difference between steam and gog
Just to be entirely fair. The rest of what you said is absolutely spot on.
I can see the functional difference there, with regards to sell/trade/loan. You could of course emulate the functionality, or rely on the honor system for abandon ware stuff, but that’s clunky, inefficient, not worth the energy.
I hadn’t considered the second hand aspect. Even as a kid, I was always more a “build a library” kind of person versus a “cycle my catalog” kind of person. I was considering things from an availability to play the game perspective alone. Thanks for the different perspective!
I think it might be more subtle than that, unions exist so that when negotiations happen they can fuck back, but we know Microsoft can strategise longer term than that. They pioneered “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Embracing a union then trying to infiltrate and turn it into a corporatised union is another version of that exact same play.
It’s more likely a cost benefit analysis. Fighting the Unions is lawyer expensive and PR expensive. Gamers are noisy after all, when riled up. Microsoft is evil, but also like Trump, they understand optics.
Companies can leverage CBAs to “fix” pay scales well below CPI or other metrics by forcing extensive negotiation as a way to sell down an agreement. Similarly, they can use agreements to create separate classes, for example: the SAG/AFTRA agreement for voice actors with all the Gen AI exemptions.
pcgamer.com
Ważne