The ship builder is just tons of fun. I wish the controls were a little bit more obvious but once you get the hang of it, I think it’s my favourite in genre. I love building something neat and then going to check out the interior walkthrough, particularly. I think I need a save where I just cheat in millions of credits so i can experiment for a while
Is it? I find it pretty fun, sure games like everspace did it better, but that is literally a space dogfighting game lol.
NMS space combat is noticably worse in comparison, and some of the upgrade paths and the ability to adjust your reactor usage (very reminiscent of FTL) make it interesting enough for me.
Your ship is kinda like a player home you bring around with you. Having one that uniquely suits your needs and preferences is cool, and also I want a damn weapon workbench.
This concept of a second screen show is so unbelievably fucking moronic… It’s your own damn fault if you’re not paying attention!
I have a second monitor that I play things on, and it’s either a stream of someone playing something similar or the same game, or it’s a show I’ve already watched and know the story of.
If I’m watching something new, then I’m watching it. To have stories dumbed down, or just butchered to suit tictok brainrotted people completely devoid of attention spans is so freaking depressing and only exacerbates the issue. But in the end I guess I get it, you’re out for a profit and it hurts to have a plethora of idiots rate you poorly because they weren’t paying attention and didn’t understand the story… Ughh…
While I hate googles tendency to kill everything I have to ask, did google really promise chromebooks as a gaming system? I always understood them as dirt cheap computers made to handle the basics of word processing and average web based applications. Ideal only to be school or work computers
Honestly I think that’s the constant problem of every “low cost computer” setup that comes out. They start out with an understanding of what they are… a cheap disposable alternative for doing the basics, after getting some momentum in that they cry about the lack of profit margins, keep adding to it to justify pricing them the same as regular laptops, but at the fundamental level do far less and they don’t sell for crap at that price.
Like say netbooks, it’s so commonly assumed the ipad killed the netbook… as a former netbook owner I disagree. I bought an acer aspire 1 when they were on sale for like $100, it was a really low powered, basic windows system. If I recall it was running win XP in the vista era. For me it was a good choice, a nice note taking, word document writing and basic web browsing computer with a decent battery life, and tiny enough to slip in a bag with little work.
I worked at staples at the time, and if I recall they were around $200 regular price, but frequently on sale for 100-150, and when they went on sale they sold like hotcakes. They had other netbooks in the 300-500 price range… I don’t think I ever saw one sell, and to this day I don’t get the appeal. You’d need more hardware if you were say, editing graphics… or playing games, or doing something more complex, but why would you do those things on a 10" screen. Same price you could buy a real laptop, bit bigger, but more importantly a comfortable screen size and a full sized keyboard. So in short, the netbooks went from a cheap option that can do the the main fundimentals of a PC slightly worse, for 1/3rd the price. To a… laptop that could do 80% of what a laptop can, on an uncomfortably tiny screen, for 100% of the price.
around the same time the ipad came out… for $500, the netbooks shifted their focus, more and more models in the $300-$700 price range. Nebooks shifted to being what I would effectively describe as… small little boxes, that do most of what a laptop does, much worse with a tiny screen… for the same price, maybe a bit more when comparing spec for spec.
Honestly i see the same with chromebooks. So you’ve got chromeos, which has less general computer support than regular linux. Can’t run MS office, slightly lesser game support. No special form factor or advantage for games like say the steam deck etc… No matter how you slice it you’ve got a computer, designed to do… say 70% of what you can on a regular laptop… for the price of… a regular laptop.
They're never gonna run demanding AAA titles, but Steam is full of simpler 2D and classic games they could handle. You could play Balatro or Stardew Valley on a Chromebook.
Hate to “umm ackshually” over what amounts to a difference of fictional rules, but for what it’s worth, vampires do have reflections in the World of Darkness setting. Only vampires of clan Lasombra (not playable in bloodlines) don’t have reflections since it’s their clan weakness.
Otherwise, if all vampires couldn’t have reflections, it would be incredibly easy to tell who’s a kindred and there would be no way of keeping up the Masquerade.
Whatever you are willing to pay, since they are most likely looking for a new job. They have experience in damage stacking and liability research. And stapling.
In a real ‘what if’ moment for Taito he even “made a prototype for a new games console, but that was not approved by the sales team as they were purely focused on arcade games.”
The Taito sales team, as it was back then, hovers in the background of Nishikado’s recollections like a ghost: it clearly exerted great influence on what the company would allow the creatives to make.
Marketing people are bunch of idiots. They stop real creativity and replace it with copies of what succeed somewhere else.
1983 was a uniquely American event. Japan and Europe were unaffected, and as no Japanese consoles had any success in the US at the time they wouldn’t have aimed for an American release anyway, while Europe only bought computers.
Other than GOTY edition of the first game, this entire series has LAN (so far), which is commendable and stupidly rare! I hope the GOTY edition doesn’t show that they’re nixing this for BL4 as well.
They just don’t make memes like they used to, and none of us can just run in without fearing the wrath of strangers. The folks who take games too seriously won.
Maybe not everywhere, but multiplayer games for sure have more serious elements to them than I ever thought.
In a way, this is what I wanted back in the 90s when so few people understood the potential of video games as a serious art form.
In a way, this is what I wanted back in the 90s when so few people understood the potential of video games as a serious art form.
Same, but definitely not for competitive multiplayer games. That’s the antithesis of the direction gaming should go in.
Instead, we should’ve moved more towards co-op. Gamers would be happier and healthier, which is why it was decided they should not appreciate it.
I genuinely feel bad for all the people getting suckered into wasting hundreds of hours in a game like fortshit just because it’s free and their loser friends got suckered into playing it, too. They have no idea what’s happening around them. If they ever realize it, it will likely be too late.
I've been saying it for the last decade, there's no real "games are too expensive to make" problem. There's only studios choosing the "go big or go home" death spiral where they inflate the budget and need a hit to stay afloat. But then after every hit the budget grows even bigger requiring an even bigger hit until eventually they're going to flop and the studio goes under. They could just not do that and have a sustainable business. And I get that it's not only the game developers fault. Part of the blame falls on the publishers who most likely force budgets to balloon so they could make more money (if the game is a success). But when I say they could just not do that I mean both the developer and publisher. Both of them should be smarter than that.
But clearly even with all the major flops it has been a successful strategy, because they've been at it since at least mid 2000s. It's only in the recent years where it's really starting to strain all the AAA publishers as the budgets have grown too big even for them. These price increases are an outcome of this budget ballooning. They're feeling their bottom line taking a hit so they increase the price to mitigate the risk.
Personally I said fuck them, let it crash and let's get more studios like Sandfall, who made an exceptional games for a reasonable price.
It seems like there’s a few studios that get this trick. Hazelight (Split Fiction, It Takes Two) seems to have a good cadence to releases and likely hasn’t inflated their size all that much. They’re consistently making good games.
on top of all that; big money, be it profits or revenue, attracts parasites that start ruining the company from the inside. One can feel it on many games that developers wanted to do good but were prevented from doing so because of executives and middle management.
There is definitely an argument that AA games are a mistake.
But, since 4 or so, GTA kind of has been THE AAA (arguably AAAA) game and those releases literally buoy the industry.
Maybe you aren’t excited for it. Pretty much the entire rest of the (gaming) world is and so are their friends.
Going purely by “vibes”? I could be “okay” with a world where GTA 6 is 80-90, most major studio games are 60-70, small studios are 40-50, and indy games start closer to 30 than 15. Still plenty of room for waiting for a sale but also makes it a lot easier to be successful without selling millions of copies in the first month.
I’m glad they’re excited for it, but I’d put money on the fact that they’re not excited for literally every facet of the game, which is my entire point.
I don’t think GTA games are garbage - they’re literally designed to appeal to as many people as they can. The problem is R* thinks the way to design a game is to include 500 things, make the game take nearly a decade and cost nearly a billion dollars to produce - that game has to sell at 90 bucks, and it’s bloated with a ton of shit I don’t care about.
I’d rather pay 50-60 dollars for a focused game aimed at a specific audience (see: expedition 33, JRPG fans) than 40 extra dollars for a bunch of shit I don’t care about in a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator.
Edit: remember bowling with Nico? The train mission? Flying in general? All shit people paid for that actively annoyed them.
At 90 bucks, nearly every consumer is paying some % for bloat they don’t care about, all in the name of making a game that will sell the most units.
I don’t think GTA games are garbage - they’re literally designed to appeal to as many people as they can.
And they do.
I’d rather pay 50-60 dollars for a focused game aimed at a specific audience (…) At 90 bucks, nearly every consumer is paying some % for bloat they don’t care about
So you want games made specifically for you and cheaper.
Don’t get me wrong. It is genuinely awesome when it feels like a studio spent years making a game specifically for you (see: most of us Armored Core fans with 6). That works until that audience doesn’t show up. This is what led to THQ and the like crashing and burning a decade or two ago where games were successful but “not successful enough”
MAYBE that is going to be GTA6. Signs are, it won’t be. Because, yes, GTA 6 might not be catered directly to you. But the vast majority of people are going to love the overall package. Maybe they skip a feature. For example, I love the Yakuza/LAD games. Unless there is a story beat (involving a character I care about), basically nothing can make me do the crane game for more than two or three minutes (so one purchase…). Similarly, I loved Lost Judgment and have a LOT of Thoughts and Feelings on it. It would be one of my all time favorite games if it weren’t for the fucking after school special minigames.
Doesn’t matter. It might not be a 100% amazing game but it was still a 90% amazing game which… is still really fun.
Because
all in the name of making a game that will sell the most units.
Yes. And… Rockstar pulls that off. I don’t know why they would actively choose to sell fewer units just to make sure you never play a sequence you don’t enjoy.
Again, just to be clear: Very few studios can pull this off. We all make fun of RGG for how much they reuse everything but… that drastically lowers costs and lets them get out a solid 30-70 hour game once or twice a year. And studios trying to turn an A game into a AAA game is literally how THQ died.
But Rockstar is… well, a bunch of rockstars. They CAN do that. They do this through a lot of abuse of labor and manipulative marketing but… it works.
And, to be clear. I actively disliked what I played of RDR2. I found GTA 5 to be “fine”. But me thinking the games are worth getting on sale for 20-30 doesn’t matter when you have the population of a small country immediately ready to buy it at launch multiple times.
So you want games made specifically for you and cheaper.
No, I want games with focus. A game doesn’t have to appeal to me - I don’t give a shit about racing games but I can appreciate Gran Turismo’s focus on realistic driving simulation (or at least that’s what it was decades ago, I don’t keep up with racing games), and I imagine the realistic driving sim enthusiasts were really happy they didn’t need to play some prop plane flying mini game to earn the color they want for their Charger or to “get all the trophies” and that they didn’t have to pay an extra 5-10-15 bucks for the privilege.
Don’t get me wrong. It is genuinely awesome when it feels like a studio spent years making a game specifically for you (see: most of us Armored Core fans with 6). That works until that audience doesn’t show up. This is what led to THQ and the like crashing and burning a decade or two ago where games were successful but “not successful enough”
Blame the Publishers and human greed for that. FROMsoft seems to have absolutely 0 issue making highly specific games that only pander to a tiny subset of gamers (before ER anyway), and they knock it out of the park 9 times out of 10. Was it the 84 on metacritic that screwed Respawn out of a bonus on Titanfall 1/2 despite both of those games being fucking amazing? I remember that story vaguely (84 on metacritic, no bonus) but might be getting the pub/dev/game wrong. I don’t agree with the “Well, that’s the way it is, get used to it” mentality.
MAYBE that is going to be GTA6. Signs are, it won’t be. Because, yes, GTA 6 might not be catered directly to you. But the vast majority of people are going to love the overall package. Maybe they skip a feature. For example, I love the Yakuza/LAD games. Unless there is a story beat (involving a character I care about), basically nothing can make me do the crane game for more than two or three minutes (so one purchase…). Similarly, I loved Lost Judgment and have a LOT of Thoughts and Feelings on it. It would be one of my all time favorite games if it weren’t for the fucking after school special minigames.
People don’t “skip a feature” in modern GTA games - they skip dozens, or actively complain about them because they’re annoying (Nico, flying, train). Because they’re designed as generic massive time sinkholes for the lowest common denominator.
Yes. And… Rockstar pulls that off. I don’t know why they would actively choose to sell fewer units just to make sure you never play a sequence you don’t enjoy.
Good for them? I still don’t want 90 dollar games that are only 90 dollars because they’re “Include all the things!” bonanza’s where I’m paying for shit I don’t care about.
You can make a ton of profit a bunch of different ways - Spend a decade making a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator that will appeal to most for an obscene price, or create a passion project for a fair price. I prefer the latter. Again, Look at expedition 33 - 2 million units sold, tiny team, passion pouring out of every facet for a JRPG lover like myself. They didn’t need to spend 500 million dollars and a decade with a team of hundreds to produce a GOTY level product, so I only have to pay 50 bucks. Why would I pay R* 90 for a game where for every 2-3 facets I like there’s a facet I don’t care for That I paid for? Why would the general public?
Also, there’s no need to come off so contentious, this isn’t that shithole Reddit brother, we can disagree and still be friends.
No, I want games with focus. A game doesn’t have to appeal to me
It just… can’t appeal to a lot of people without being perfectly catered to them?
Blame the Publishers and human greed for that. FROMsoft seems to have absolutely 0 issue making highly specific games that only pander to a tiny subset of gamers (before ER anyway),
Dude… Dark Souls is a frigging Metroidvania. And every youtube essayist looking for some clicks will point out how incredibly tutorialized Dark Souls 1 is up to the Lordvessel. People whinge that Spirit Ashes made Elden Ring too easy all while not realizing that basically every hard boss in Dark 1 and 3 has an NPC summon… and the Dark 2 SOTS update added the ones that were missing.
I love the Souls games. It is fun to pretend they are super hardcore affairs for those of us who want to drive nails into our proverbial winkies (and some. mostly non-From, ones are) but they are ridiculously mainstream games with off the chart vibes.
Was it the 84 on metacritic that screwed Respawn out of a bonus on Titanfall 1/2 despite both of those games being fucking amazing?
I forget what the budget of Titanfall 1 and 2 were but both are very clearly A/AA games in terms of scope and what the budget “should” be. If they were actually somehow the kind of industry goliath that a GTA is then… EA done fucked up.
To put it in movie terms: You are complaining that a Michael Bay transformers is not as tight and well done as Before Midnight. They are completely different scopes.
Good for them? I still don’t want 90 dollar games that are only 90 dollars because they’re “Include all the things!” bonanza’s where I’m paying for shit I don’t care about.
Then don’t pay for it? Again, you (and I) don’t fucking matter when a significant chunk of the planet are perfectly eager to play those giant tentpole games.
You can make a ton of profit a bunch of different ways
Oh, well. If you are a master of the economy maybe you can fix the games industry so that there aren’t massive layoffs every week?
Spend a decade making a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator that will appeal to most for an obscene price, or create a passion project for a fair price.
Again. If you actually CAN make the “jack of all trades master of none” (which is actually a complete mischaracterization of the GTAs but…) game… you make it. Because 11.21 million people who are “mostly happy” and buy it on launch (in 2013 numbers) is a hell of a lot more money than 2 million people who are “ridiculously happy” (in 2025 numbers) in the first few weeks. And, for funsies, RDR2’s week two sales were 17 million in 2018
They didn’t need to spend 500 million dollars and a decade with a team of hundreds to produce a GOTY level product, so I only have to pay 50 bucks.
Let’s actually break that down.
Clair Obscur is a game that came out of the ubisoft content mines. We all love the idea that Guilaume Broche made it in his shed with scraps but he applied most of the game design lessons and industry connections from his time at Ubisoft (and 12 coworkers from Ubisoft) to found his studio and secure funding.
Ubisoft… is not in good shape. But, 5-10 years ago, they were very reliably in that AA/AAA space and the AssCreed games were used specifically to point out that platform exclusive games weren’t the be all end all anymore and that most people were playing the same games regardless of what console they bought.
CO also is a game that came out of the “infinite money” of COVID in 2020-2022-ish. Contrast that with the modern gaming landscape where money for devs is increasingly tight and studios are getting shuttered left and right. Xalavier Nelson Jr has talked about this at length in the context of Strange Scaffold which… is kind of what everyone says they want in a studio. They make great games with a ridiculous amount of heart on time and on budget with little to no DLC. But that still costs money.
Why would I pay R* 90 for a game where for every 2-3 facets I like there’s a facet I don’t care for That I paid for? Why would the general public?
You wouldn’t because you seem to think everything needs to be perfectly catered to you.
The general public does because they like 80-95% of a game and value having a great 20-30 hours with it.
AGAIN. This is not a model that most studios should follow. It was basically the killing fields back in the early-mid 2010s when studios and publishers were dropping like flies because they tried to make AA/AAA games that sold B/A numbers. Arguably, this is what has been leading to Sony and Microsoft killing SOME of their studios (less so one like Tango who get praised as what studios SHOULD be by the prick that fired them all a week or two before that interview).
Rockstar and especially GTA is not that. They are peak Transformers/MCU where they can, through one means or another, employ a significant percentage of the overall industry and still turn a ridiculous profit. And, as a result, keep those support studios open for other studios/films to use them (less so the MCU these days…).
Which gets back to: I 100% think there is an argument that AA games are a mistake. That puts studios in a very dangerous spot where they need to get amazing sales just to break even. Whereas a B/A game can be something like Clair Obscur or Armored Core 6 which is a very limited scope with the potential to branch out. But for the studios who can do AAA? They have every reason to because it makes ridiculous bank AND buoys the industry as a whole.
We’re just going to have to agree to disagree brother.
I’d say you’re cool paying for quantity while I’m cool paying for quality, but even that comparison doesn’t hold up - of course you’re getting more quantity, you’re happy to pay 50-60% more than I am for it.
I prefer games designed with passion, to be good games, over games designed to “Sell the most units”. I’ll take Krav Maga over arasaka-te any day, for what I hope are super obvious reasons.
And the only thing R* is “buoying” is increasing the price of all games for all gamers without an equal increase in quality content - they’re not alone there though, Nintendo is helping. Fuck em both.
If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.
Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.
Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!
I’d imagine people who are really into “Choices Matter” and some people who are really into story would.
I play !visualnovels and half the fun is seeing what decisions lead to different outcomes. And getting different outcomes for different choices, especially if they are big choices, makes me feel like my choices matter and impact the world, as opposed to if all these supposedly important choices can only ever get me 2 or 3 different endings.
Although I do share your question about how popular my opinion is with other gamers.
Big appreciation for Undertale, which has 3 major endings but hundreds of variations for each. It’s nice to have the game acknowledge what you did and give you resolution.
Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.
There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.
The same is true for almost any open world game with vehicles. Casually driving a car in GTA while obeying the traffic rules has been a thing from the very beginning.
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